Crown Breakers
by Soda Khan
Summary: An icy breeze is about to hit Auradon when four new VKs transfer in from the Isle. The daughter of a serious troublemaker has her own plans, her own friends, and her own distinct ideas about the happy kingdom. Featuring OC descendants from The Princess and the Frog, Atlantis, The Black Cauldron, Frozen and more.
1. The World's Greatest Criminal Mind

I guess, if you wanted to be _good_ , you'd do what Jay and Evie and Carlos and Mal did. You'd let those self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical wardens at Auradon brainwash you. You'd start going to their tea parties – so _civilized_ , so _pastel_ , so _vapid_ – and you'd start thinking things like:

"Maybe no one should question the ethics behind getting fairies to do all your hard work."

"Maybe we shouldn't ask what drives a person to villainy, maybe they just deserve to be trapped inside a dome."

"Maybe there _is_ only one way to be good, but a thousand ways to be bad."

I understand the appeal. I really do. We all wish we were born on the side of the fence where our crystalline singing voices and flawless hair could be enough to guarantee wealth and contentment for the rest of our lives. And then there's the romantic notion of being that oh-so-troubled VK with the strained relationship with your damaged parent, shunned by the popular kids because of your alternative style, but having the kind and generous heart of a princess. _If only they could see beyond your lowly street rat status!_ _Maybe magic and friendship will fix everything!_

But there are two sides to magic, and friendship is a salve not a cure.

I'll tell you what my father said to me the last time I saw him before his mysterious disappearance:

"If somebody seems too good to be true, it's because they are."

I mean, really think about this. My father, once upon a time, did something wrong (you and I probably have very different views about what exactly that was, but that's an argument for another day), so he gets punted to an island full of people much more dangerous than he ever was, with no chance to rehabilitate because in order to survive he has to be every bit as ruthless as his fellow prisoners. And the royal goodie-goodie devising this cage match of raw ambition and dark magic? A guy who was turned into a beast for eleven years for being rude at a dinner party. Now if that isn't the kind of person who should be able to scrounge up a little sympathy…

But no. Sympathy could upset the status quo. Sympathy could mean that the heirs of villains with royal blood could make succession claims one day.

Sympathy is a threat to power.

I'm sorry, I get a little carried away sometimes. You're not here for my philosophical ramblings. You're here to learn for the story of how a new batch of VK's were given a chance to learn to be good in a world full of evil. It's a great story, you'll love it. There're make-overs, and winter dances, and magic treasures, and new friends and familiar faces, and secrets, and betrayals, and an attempted murder. It was a hell of a year at Auradon Prep, no one can deny that.

And I had the best seat in the house.

* * *

"Does this shirt look too tight?" Armand asked, flexing in front of one of the many full length mirrors we'd encountered in one of the many waiting rooms we'd be thrown in since arriving in Auradon.

I looked up from my reading, a treasured copy of _Isolationism in Pride Rock: The Hyena's Case_. It was my fourth or fifth time reading it through. Like all of my books, before bringing it with me, I'd swapped the cover out for something more… palatable to my new schoolmates (in this case _Glass Slippers and Fancy Yogurt: How to Treat Yourself like Royalty_ ).

Armand was dressed very simply in a white t-shirt, with his preferred distressed black jeans and his worn brown leather boots. His dark hair was loose and combed neatly to one side, his dimpled chin jutted from a square jaw, and his broad shouldered, naturally muscular physique made him look more like a statue of Hercules than the son of Gaston.

"It looks tight," I told him.

"But _too_ tight? I want it to look _too_ tight," he clasped his hands to one side of his bright red belt and squeezed them just enough to make his biceps pop. "I want everyone to think that there's no shirt in the world that can hold the grandeur of Armand."

"It could be the tightest shirt in all the realms and it wouldn't matter," I shrugged. "They're going to see what they want to see when they look at us, not what we want them to see."

I could feel the other two shooting inquisitive glances at me. One of them, the only other girl, I didn't know too well. She was going to rule Auradon if she wanted to, that was obvious right away. She was tall, blonde, and a perfect mix of athletic and feminine. Her mother had been involved in some sort of scheme to destroy Atlantis. Her name was Ingrid, and if I'd had her looks, I would've gone for the full secret princess routine straight out of the gate. The fourth member of our gang of charity cases was an altogether more notorious figure.

He was as tall as Armand, but all sinew and bone. He looked like he'd never eaten enough to be satisfied in his entire life. He was called Cadfael, and he was supposedly the son of The Horned King, but there were more than a few rumours about how the term _son_ was being defined.

If you knew how to pay attention to things that weren't easy to notice, you could see him around the Isle, standing in shadows never too deep or too faint to be suspicious. He hadn't said anything on the ride over, or in the three hours of shuffling and moving and following ushers since then. He just took everything in. When his eyes landed on me, I felt like a jaguar being watched by a crocodile.

It wasn't a feeling I was used to.

"What are they going to want to see?" Ingrid asked. She sounded nervous, and I felt bad because she didn't seem like a person who was used to being nervous, otherwise I probably wouldn't have been so candid.

"It depends on the person," I shut my book properly. "Some of them are going to look at us like sad waifs who need lots of instruction and patience, and everything about us will seem unrefined or desperate. Some of them are going to look at us like intruders, being brought in to compete with them for accolades and resources – more mouths at the cafeteria, more rungs on the social ladder – and they'll decide that anything that goes wrong while we're here is because of us. They'll give themselves away when they form the first mob. A handful are going to want to be like us, because they've decided that we're edgy. They'll tell us all the Isle bands they know, invite us around to give them eyeliner tips, be largely annoying—"

I didn't get a chance to finish, my voice trailing off into a whisper as footsteps drew closer in the outside hall. It sounded like more than one person.

I was so distracted by wondering if they'd overheard me at all, I almost didn't notice how mortified Ingrid had started to look during my mini-overview of our future social prospects.

"Your girlfriend's kind of a downer," she said to Armand.

"Yeah," he chuckled, plunking down on the sofa next to me and wrapping an arm around my shoulders, "but she's usually right."

"I'm not his girlfriend," I clarified.

"Of course you are," he said, as the door opened and three new people entered the room.

At the head of the little triangle they formed was a short, smiling woman in a pale blue dress. The Fairy Godmother herself, a woman who decided to bide her time for almost twenty years of her goddaughter's suffering only to show up and lend the girl a pretty dress and an impractical pair of shoes for a few hours. Her generosity has always been highly overrated.

Behind her were Belle and the Beast. I could feel Armand shift uncomfortably beside me. He'd told me, when we were first selected for this year's program, that he was least looking forward to having to meet the King and Queen. He couldn't articulate why, but he didn't have to. In a second moment of weakness that day, I moved ever so slightly against his chest, to let him think that I was more nervous than I actually was. If he felt like he had to be bold on my behalf, he'd swallow his own fears. He gave me a reassuring pat and settled into the new closeness, and I could feel his heartbeat start to slow down.

"Welcome," Fairy Godmother said with the oozing sympathy women like her usually reserved for post-breakup margarita parties. "We're so glad to have you with us. I don't know how much you know about our last group of exchange students—"

"Oh, everything," Ingrid supplied with a dry sarcasm I immediately admired. "Golly, we just couldn't stop talking about how lucky they were to be forcibly removed from their school and friends and never heard from again."

Belle looked at Ingrid with generic maternal pity. _Poor thing,_ she was probably thinking, _she simply doesn't know how to behave_.

"Yes, well." Fairy Godmother went on, clearly a little ruffled by the reply. "Of course, that's not strictly true. They had video chats with their parents, and campaigned for several of their friends from the Isle to attend alongside them. All four of them were among our most successful graduates last year, the daughter of the Evil Queen was valedictorian. And Mal, daughter of Maleficent, is set to become the next queen of Auradon, if she so chooses!"

Behind her, Belle and the Beast exchanged a knowing smile.

It could've meant either _ah, young love_ or _over our dead bodies is she going to actually marry our son_. It didn't matter much either way.

"Since it was such a successful program, and a passion project of Young King Ben's, he's asked that we continue it this year – he's currently travelling abroad, otherwise I'm sure he would've loved meeting all of you personally."

Armand made a high-pitched, skeptical noise in the back of his throat.

Belle's serene expression broke for just a second, and she narrowed her eyes at him.

Was it because he was Gaston's son? Or was it because he obviously doubted the benevolence of her only child and heir? Some mixture of both, I decided.

"I've heard good things about Young King Ben," I said, with my most convincing shy smile. "I think anyone who wants to give us a chance… I mean, he obviously wants the world to be a better place, and that's really nice."

This earned me a nod from the Beast.

"Ben believes that you have the right to your own stories," he said. "It's an important opportunity, and one I know you won't waste."

I mustered another self-conscious smile, then quickly looked down at the hands folded in my lap.

It was hard not to laugh. I could feel Ingrid's amused approval, and I knew that if I met her eyes, we'd both burst into a full-on cackle.

For his part, Armand was well accustomed to my sudden swings in demeanour.

"There are like three different versions of you," he'd told me a few months earlier, after I'd gotten him out of a tight spot with one of Madam Mim's granddaughters. "I like all of them."

After that I let him hang around more. Mostly because I'd been under the impression that there were only two versions of me, and I wanted to find out what he thought the third one was.

"I've asked my daughter, Jane, to show you around the building. She's your age, and she became close friends with our last batch of VKs," Fairy Godmother said. "She knows more about what you're going through than you might expect. I hope you'll all see her as your own, miniature fairy godmother. But first, we're having an assembly to announce your arrival to your classmates and give you a proper introduction."

"It seems like the best thing to do," Belle added. "That way there won't be as much gossip and speculation. They'll know exactly who you are, and why you're here. Now, if you'll just line up, let's see, we'll do boys on one side and girls on the other. My goodness you're all very tall. Well, almost all of you."

She smiled condescendingly at average little me. I decided to look embarrassed and ignore the very obvious way she placed me next to Cadfael instead of Armand.

"Oh!" I said, with a semi-legitimate flash of worry, "Our things! My books! Is it safe to just leave them in here?"

"Why, of course!" Beast laughed, "What could happen to them?"

"Stolen, vandalized, lit on fire, cursed as a prank, dipped in poison…" Ingrid listed, causing all three adults to look so deeply, deeply sorry for our troubled lives.

"We don't do things like that here," Belle told us.

I have to confess, in my whole sixteen years living on the Isle of the Lost, I never once had to worry that a bunch of junior princesses in waiting were going to make a bonfire of my literature collection. So her reassurances weren't all that comforting.

"Can we lock the door?" Armand asked. "Just in case."

"You'll find that there's little need for locked doors here at Auradon Prep," Belle replied.

"If it makes them feel better…" Fairy Godmother said softly.

"No, no, the Queen is right," Beast said, putting his hand up to halt further discussion. "This is an important first experience for them. They need to see that their things will be safe and untouched when they come back to them."

A ripple of nerves ran through our little group as we followed the procession of adults out of the room. I noticed beside me Cadfael very slightly moved his hand, like he was pushing a wave through the air, then turned an invisible key. I made a point of not looking over my shoulder when I head the whisper-soft thud of the door's wood against the frame, and the soft mechanical click of the lock.

It was a bit of a surprise that they led us into a formal garden, and not an assembly room or cafeteria. The place was crowded with cliché royal plants, like box hedges and Wonderland roses, and there was an ornate white pavilion that looked to be our destination. Along the side of the garden were trays of assorted refreshments, and the whole thing had the distinctive air of an engagement brunch, even though it was obviously a welcome back party for seniors. Every girl in the group was dressed in a knee-length dress of a late summer hue.

I cursed myself for wearing my usual go-to of white skinny jeans, although I was nowhere near as out of place as Ingrid, in her black commando boots with low-tied laces and the tongues sticking out over military green leggings. Her sheepskin lined bomber jacket was the most masculine piece of clothing in the entire garden. That included all of the Auradon guys, who apparently thought bright yellow trousers and baby blue polo shirts were a good statement to make.

When we were lined up like victims of a firing squad in front of the pavilion, Fairy Godmother produced a tea cup from somewhere or other and tapped it daintily with the side of a spoon. The sound rang out over the crowd, and all eyes turned to us as a hush fell over the garden.

"First of all, welcome back to what will be your final year at Auradon Prep. It's a year that will be tinged with the sadness of leaving, but full of promises of the great things to come, and we truly hope that it will be your greatest year yet," she announced with such saccharine sentimentality I worried about my blood sugar. "As you know, our past exchanges with students from the Isle of the Lost have been extremely rewarding—"

"Why do they keep calling this an exchange?" Cadfael whispered to me, and I almost jumped because it was the first time I'd ever heard him speak. "They haven't sent any of their children to study on the island."

"They probably think 'forced assimilations' is too much of a mouthful," I whispered back, doing my utmost not to let my lips move too much.

"—introduce this year's new students. They are the lucky recipients of this opportunity to finish their education among Auradon's elite. First we have Armand, son of Gaston," Fairy Godmother motioned for Armand to step forward, and he did.

"Armand," Queen Belle announced, "we forgive you for your father's crimes and accept you into our community."

The crowd broke out into polite applause.

"Oh, how sweet," Ingrid muttered under her breath, "a name-and-shame party, just for us."

"Ingrid, daughter of Helga Sinclair," Fairy Godmother announced, and Ingrid stepped forward with defiant swagger. "Ingrid, we know that your tenacity will reward anyone lucky enough to be your friend."

The applause came, and I still don't know how Ingrid managed to flip everyone off without lifting her fingers in the slightest, but she did, and I was impressed.

"Cadfael, son of the Horned King." Cadfael didn't step forward, he just cast his eyes along the faces in the crowd. Most of them were murmuring to one another, trying to find out if anyone knew who the Horned King was. "A fresh start is our gift to you, and your talent for magic may prove to be your gift to us."

 _Here we go_ , I thought, and braced myself for what was sure to be the most important performance of the day.

"Greta, daughter of Prince Hans of the Southern Isles," Fairy Godmother announced, and before I could even step forward, a ripple of murmurs filled the courtyard. I picked a spot on the grass, and stared at it, letting my face fall in a tragic mask of sorrow. I wrung my hands softly, in a self-comforting gesture I knew to be popular among the more anxious of the royal crowd. "All of us give you our trust, and in return we accept your gentle spirit."

The single tear of gratitude was a hard-won touch. Crying only _one single tear_ takes months of practice, and I'd done it to seal the deal on my first impression. Just to look like that oh-so-troubled VK, shunned by the popular kids because of my father's villainy, but having the kind and generous heart of a dependable sidekick. If only someone would give me a chance to be their bestest best friend.

Like my father used to tell me before his mysterious disappearance:

"Hide in the story they give you."


	2. Part of Your World

To her credit, Jane wasn't as bad as I was expecting. She went to the trouble of introducing herself during the garden party, after breaking off from a small group of girls who were standing around with floral pattern tea cups and looking at the four of us like we were a zoo exhibit.

She had the usual round, friendly face one comes to expect on fairies, and chestnut brown hair tied in a neat bun at the top of her head. Something about her made me wary of her hospitality – possibly her likeness to her mother. Whatever it was, I was sure that any fairy blessings she offered would more than likely turn back on the recipient and be about as beneficial as a poisoned apple. Assessing her practical uses would take more time.

We stood around the refreshment table and listened to Jane drone on and on about the previous crop of VKs, and how she'd started out afraid of them and but later learned that deep down inside we're all just trying to do our best. Then she started talking about a girl named Audrey who was apparently the daughter of Sleeping Beauty, and also a sociopath. Jane, who told us at length how she'd overcome her insecurities and blossomed into a happy healthy person, was clearly Audrey's favourite victim during her time at the school. And obviously the scars hadn't healed, because if they had, poor Jane wouldn't be telling a bunch of strangers all about it at a buffet table.

I was musing on how sloppy and unfocused Audrey's attacks had been, when Armand picked up a large platter of deviled eggs and started doing a favourite trick of his. He flicked the egg up into the air so that the filling stayed intact, then caught it in his mouth.

"Is he going to eat that whole tray?" Jane asked nobody in particular.

"Um, probably?" I said meekly.

He was definitely going to eat the whole tray. That's why he'd picked up the entire tray. If he only wanted a few, he'd have gotten a plate like a normal person.

"What do the locals do for fun around here?" Ingrid asked our guide, keeping one eye on Armand's hypnotic display of egg consumption.

"Oh! Well! We have lots of annual events! There's the fall ball, the winter ball, the spring ball, the carnival, Family Day, fairy tale theater—"

Ingrid raised an eyebrow.

"So, just to be clear on this, we're spending 90% of our academic focus on princessy bull, and the only thing people do to cut loose around here is _more_ princessy bull? I honestly do not believe that's possible," she said.

"Last one!" Armand declared triumphantly, tossing what was indeed the final egg into his mouth.

"I'm sorry, are you saying princess's ball? I don't really understand…" Jane said to Ingrid.

"No, I am saying _princessy,_ an adjective meaning in the style of an ornamental figurehead, and _bull,_ as in the shortened version of the term bullsh—"

"Jane!" I heard Fairy Godmother shout very suddenly, intentionally to cut off Ingrid's profanity as she hurried over to us. "Ha ha! Why don't you start the tour? It'll be easier while everyone's still at the parties, you'll have most of the grounds to yourself!"

"Oh," Jane said, totally bewildered. "Okay, Mom. I guess that's a good point."

As we all began filing out for the walking tour of our gilded cage, Fairy Godmother put a hand on Ingrid's arm to stop her.

"We're very careful with our language at Auradon Prep," she warned.

"You'd better tell the staff to have a lot of detention slips handy while I'm around," Ingrid replied dryly.

Armand unknowingly interrupted the moment when he handed Fairy Godmother the empty silver tray and said:

"Please tell your chefs they use too much salt."

Jane led our group through an exit opposite to the way we'd come in. There were a number of rose covered trellises we had to go under, and a group of anthropomorphic pansies and daisies singing some kind of welcome back song. I didn't know it until then, but it turns out talking flowers creep me right out. Ten gold stars on the ick scale.

"What a beautiful garden!" I heard myself cooing as a kind of defense mechanism against thinking about those gross little daisies too much. I decided I couldn't be made to go back into that garden unless it was _absolutely necessary_.

The path led us out into a main courtyard at the entrance to the school grounds. It was decorated with geometric hedges and manicured lawns carving through concrete paths, and its laughably gaudy centerpiece was an enormous marble statue of the King. An enchantment had been put upon it so that it morphed in and out of Beast form.

"It's to remind us that anything is possible," Jane explained, sounding like she was reciting a brochure.

"I am going to throw up," Armand announced. I turned to look at him, puzzled. I'd warned him well in advance that we were going to have to pretend to like this garbage.

At once I realized he was being literal, he was sweating profusely and his skin had taken on a decidedly green tinge.

"Ugh, yeah, I'm totally gonna…" He lurched towards the bushes at the bottom of the statue.

"Whoa!" Ingrid shouted.

Cadfael took a lightning quick, reflexive step back from the group.

"Oh, oh no…" Armand groaned, doubled over and retched. Luckily, he hadn't actually vomited yet, but it wasn't a battle he was going to win. As fast as I could, I got underneath one of his arms and hoisted him in another direction.

"You cannot spew hard boiled eggs onto the heavily symbolic statue of the king," I hissed under my breath. "We're already working from a net loss because of your father."

"Don't carry me, you're too little," he groaned, and I swear I could hear the acid rising into his throat, but he managed to hold it in. His left armpit was directly on top of my head, and the sheer weight of all his muscle had me walking at a forty-five degree angle, the soles of my boots slipping against the pavement.

"Go on ahead," I called cheerfully to the others with a crooked wave, "we'll catch up! This isn't the first time he's done this! We'll be fine!"

Somewhere behind us, Jane was frantically trying to regain the tour's momentum, and I could hear her voice trailing off while she explained a curriculum overview. I managed to somehow deposit Armand on top of a nearby garbage can, which was thankfully not singing, and sat down on a piece of pavement outside of the splash zone.

It was not a glamorous moment.

When he was done, he plunked down beside me in a great big heap and mumbled some apologies.

"Why did you eat so many eggs?" I laughed and shook my head.

"I thought it would impress some of the guys," he confessed. "People are nice if you can impress them, and I want people to be nice to us."

It wasn't a terrible idea. He'd gone about it all wrong, and if he'd asked my opinion on it beforehand, I would've told him to save his egg eating prowess for specific audiences, not random assemblages of our peers, but he got points for trying.

I rubbed his back in small, soothing circles, and we sat quietly for a couple of minutes.

"I wish I had some gum," he said after a while.

I produced a wrapped restaurant mint I'd been keeping in my pocket for emergencies and handed it to him with a resentful sigh. I wasn't going to forget that he owed me a replacement mint. I'm not a genie or a fairy or someone with any magical aptitude; I have to get things like that myself, and let me tell you, it's actually not easy to find a wrapped, clean, not-coated-in-a-sinister-potion after dinner mint on the Isle of the Lost.

"You could probably use a drink of water, too," I said, standing up. "Where's our group?"

The courtyard was completely silent except for distant twittering birdsong. I couldn't see any sign of Jane or Ingrid or Cadfael, and the paths out of the courtyard splintered into a dozen or so directions.

"Did you see which way they went?" Armand asked.

"Funnily enough, I was distracted by the big sweaty time-bomb of eggs and remorse crushing my head when they left," I answered.

"This calls for the tracking skills of an expert hunter," he said with an awful lot of smugness for a guy who just had his head in a trash can. "Now, let's see, they didn't leave any footprints because the paths are paved. They didn't break any twigs because they wouldn't have walked _through_ the hedges, they would've walked _around_ them... I guess we could head back to the garden and ask that teacher woman for help?"

I thought about those awful little flowers singing their creepy, creepy song.

"I don't want to get Jane in trouble right now," I waved off the suggestion. "Since it's a tour of the school, they probably went inside the main building. And at the very least, we're more likely to find you a drinking fountain in there."

I struck off in the direction of the ostentatious front doors to the school, with Armand ambling along behind me.

"You seem angry," he said. "Are you mad at me?"

That stopped me in my tracks. Seeming angry was not good, sidekicks could be _sassy_ but never truly _angry_. I took a deep, bracing breath and focused. _Sad and nervous_ , I told myself, _like a little mouse in a country field. Sad and nervous. Sad and nervous_. I forced my eyes to go wide, glanced around furtively, noticed how physically small I was next to Armand and let that smallness define me.

"I hope the others aren't worried," I said in my sweetest voice, "we'd better find them."

"Okay, sure," he nodded, "but are you mad at me, babe?"

"No," I whispered at him, "I'm frustrated because instead of giving us a useful map, they gave us a tour guide who abandoned us."

"You told her to go."

"I meant for her to go slightly far away enough to not have to watch you revisit your one-man eating contest, not disappear into an endless corridor of hedges," I explained, very calmly, doing my utmost to recapture the starry-eyed so-glad-to-be-here persona I was steadily losing my grip on. "But you're right, I should've been clearer. I'm just so worried about making a good first impression on our new friends."

Armand nodded understandingly and swung open the doors to the building that would be our home for the next ten months.

It smelled like cleaning chemicals.

The floors were polished to mirror shine, and the walls looked unsettlingly scrubbed and without character. Each stone was perfectly level, perfectly flat, perfectly smooth, more like a painting of a castle wall instead of a real piece of functional architecture. Lockers lined the halls, and a huge blue, yellow, and white banner proudly proclaimed that we were in the 'Home of the Knights'.

At the end of the corridor was an office area behind modern glass walls, but not a single water fountain or washroom sign in sight. They probably thought it was inappropriate to remind future queens and kings that they were all the proud owners of bladders.

"It's like a hospital in here," Armand observed.

"A hospital that wants to do gruesome experiments on us," I said, heading cautiously into the belly of the beast.

"Let's run away!" Armand said with such urgent conviction it startled me. "Right now! We can steal one of the royal limousines – do you know how to hotwire a car? What am I saying, of course you do, you probably learned the model of limousine they use here and studied diagrams of its… parts or whatever…"

I was about to remind him that there was a very specific reason I agreed to come to Auradon, and I wasn't going to leave until it was done, when an unfamiliar voice called out to us.

"Hello? Is somebody there?"

It was coming from the direction of the office. I panicked, wondering how much of our conversation had been overhead, scrambling to remember what I'd said. Nothing too incriminating, right? Just a metaphor about vivisection or something, nervous new students say stuff like that all the time.

Oh no.

This had the potential to be very bad.

"Hello?" I called back in my most gentle, ladylike voice.

"Don't answer! Come on, let's go steal a car!" Armand tugged gently at my arm, "This might be our only chance to escape!"

"You're letting your nerves get the better of you, you big silly," I said very soothingly, " ** _We're_** going to have a great time **_here_** at our new school, there's nothing **_to_** worry about. We'll **_find_** out new things about ourselves, and I'll finally escape the shadow of **_my father_**. You know that."

"I don't want to upset you," Armand whispered very quietly, "but he's probably dead."

"That's nice. That makes me want to run off and live in the woods with you. Good job."

The door to the office opened and a girl our own age stepped out. She had a voluminous coiffure of rosy pink hair, decorated with a band of tiny seashells. On her wrist was a charm bracelet of tridents, boats, and more shells. Even dressed as she was in the same bland party outfit as every other female student we'd met so far, it didn't take a master detective to figure out she was from one of the mermaid lines.

"I _did_ hear voices!" She laughed, and someone more charitable might have said it was the kind of laugh that sounded like bubbles rising to the ocean surface, but to me it sounded like dolphin screeches. "I was worried I was starting to get goggled from looking at letterheads all day. And when the office door is closed, you can hardly hear a thing that goes on in the hallways. I guess that's to keep the secretaries sane when everyone's switching classes during the day, it probably sounds like a stampede!"

"I can imagine," I said with a friendly, slightly dorky chuckle of my own. "We're new, and we were just looking for a washroom. I don't suppose you could tell us which way…?"

"New?" The girl said, her demeanour stiffening as she took in the proper sight of me and Armand. "Clams and oysters! You're the VKs!"

"Two of them," I smiled. "I'm Greta, and this is Armand. Jane was showing us around, but we got separated. I'm sure it'll all be fine, but if you could tell us where the washrooms are…?"

"So exciting to meet you! I'm Asherah, one of the many granddaughters of King Triton. So Jane lost track of two of her most important charges, huh?" A flash of pure wickedness gleamed in her eyes, "Won't Fairy Godmother be interested to hear about _this_ …"

"Oh, you can't tell on Jane!" I gasped, "It's really not her fault!"

"Fairy Godmother should know if two VKs were left unattended during their first day on school grounds. Jane's a very nice girl, but sometimes her mother gives her more responsibility than she can handle."

This was an unexpectedly crucial moment for me.

Back on the Isle of the Lost, I would've done one of two things. Either I would've calmly agreed that absolutely Asherah should tell Fairy Godmother what happened, and imply that being the one to report Jane would earn the ire of her mother, and knock Asherah out of the running for a good long while. Or I would've let the chips fall wherever they may, while gently suggesting to our new acquaintance that if she didn't direct us to the washrooms in the next two seconds I'd decimate her social standing over a campaign of revenge that could span _months_.

Unfortunately, both of these strategies require the use of a built up reputation, something I didn't have at Auradon. And there was another thing, how high on the pecking order was this vicious creature? My long-term plan depended on my being able to fly under the radar when necessary. Jane was highly visible, being the daughter of the headmistress, but her good will had obvious benefits. Asherah could be anyone, really.

I decided to take a chance.

"I suppose you're right," I said with calculated thoughtfulness. "Once we catch back up with Jane, we'll make sure she tells Fairy Godmother what happened."

That knocked the wind out of Asherah's sails. She pouted. As a reflex. In full view of two new acquaintances with unknown allegiances.

She wouldn't last _a day_ on the Isle of the Lost.

"There you are!" Jane's voice called to us from further down a corridor that branched off to our left. She hurried down towards us, Ingrid and Cadfael unenthusiastically following in her wake. "I was starting to get worried."

"We were just asking for directions to the washroom," I explained.

"Right! Of course," Jane turned to Armand, "You're going to want to... yeah… Okay! I will show you that now! It's never a bad idea to know where the bathrooms are, that's for sure!"

"And one more quick thing," I added, "Asherah thinks it's best we let your mom know that Armand was sick in the garden today, and that you gave us some privacy for a few minutes. I agree with her, I don't want Fairy Godmother to think that any of us VKs are trying to sneak around, and I'd like her to hear how much we appreciate your sensitivity."

Jane lacked the necessary survival skills to realize that I'd just cut the head off a viper and brought her the fangs to formalize our alliance, but I didn't expect her to actually know what was going on.

"Um, sure. But I didn't do very much…"

"It's nice to be trusted," I said, and I really meant it.

As we followed our miniature fairy godmother down the pristine halls of Auradon Prep, I listened to the frustrated sigh Asherah let out as she slammed the office door behind her, and I thought of something my dear father used to say before his mysterious disappearance:

"The truth is like armour for the brave, and like a sword for the cunning."


	3. This is Gonna Be Good

Once we'd learned where all the classrooms were, and where the cafeteria was, and how the shoals of students were expected to ebb and flow throughout the day, Jane took us to our dorm rooms.

"It's usually more comfortable for the VKs to share doubles with each other," she explained. "Curfew is midnight, no exceptions, or you'll turn back into a pumpkin! That's fairy humour. You won't turn into a pumpkin, but you will get a demerit."

"What? That's so…!" Armand complained. "What if I'm… sleepwalking?! Because of a… medical… thing?!"

Jane nodded like she was expecting some complaints.

"I know it seems like there are a lot of rules, but they're all to make sure everyone is safe and making the best choices. Goodness can be difficult to master. Having guideposts will help you along your way."

"Our way to what?" Cadfael asked.

She was visibly blindsided by the question, her face froze somewhere between asking a question and starting a sentence.

"We're all at the beginnings of our stories," she finally blurted out, "but with the values of Auradon lighting our way, we're sure to make the world a better place!"

"So if we follow the guideposts while we're here, we'll have helpful lights in the future?" Ingrid smirked.

"Absolutely!"

"I think I'd better keep a flare gun handy."

The boys' dormitory immediately called to mind gentlemen's clubs where aristocrats sat around swilling brandy glasses, wondering what the poor were so cranky about. There was dark wood panelling, blue and yellow plaid draperies, two mahogany four poster beds and matching dressers, a blue rug that was probably imported from Agrabah, and a big screen TV. Armand was disappointed there were no antlers. Cadfael seemed disgusted with the amount of sun the windows let in.

We left them to argue over who got to sleep closest to the door.

Jane led us to the end of the corridor and up a hidden spiral staircase.

"When Mal and Evie transferred here, there was an unexpected issue with the colour pink," she said. "So Mom – I mean Fairy Godmother – thought it might be better to put you in a buttercup room instead of a rose room. That means a fountain view instead of a garden view, but there's more square footage."

Behind her, we exchanged pleased smiles. No talking posies to haunt our dreams _and_ a bigger space? If anyone asked, pink was toxic to us. We couldn't stand to be near it.

"There are course outlines on your nightstands," she went on. "Last year, we just had Doug figure it all out, but he's off with Evie starting a fashion house now, so…"

"Classic Doug," Ingrid laughed like she'd known him for years. "I've never met him in my life, but please go on talking like I care."

"Oh! Doug is Dopey's son! He's a really nice guy, he used to be in the marching band, and he was the top of about every AP course we have. He and Evie really hit it off, they're _so_ happy. I went and saw the workshop over the summer, and you will _love_ some of Evie's new designs. It's like VK meets AK."

"I was being sarcastic," Ingrid said very carefully, as though she wasn't sure if this was some kind of trick or not.

"Mal used to be sarcastic a lot. I never really got the hang of it…" Jane reminisced as she stopped in front of the door to a corner suite. "Here we are! Home sweet home!"

She swung the door open, and a flood of buttery yellow light spilled onto the polished corridor floor. The room was around the same size as Armand and Cadfael's, but decorated with a softer tone of wood. A pale yellow fabric patterned with buttercups was draped in the window, decorating the beds, and upholstering the chairs at a set of matching vanities. I walked into the center of the room and held a hand to my chest like I'd never seen anything so beautiful. _I can't believe I'm going to get to live here! I could cry!_

"Pretty different from the Isle of the Lost, huh?" Jane said warmly.

I nodded like I was too overwhelmed to speak.

Here's what actually caught my attention:

Two vanities, no desks. A strange choice for an academic institution. Two full height dressers and twin closets, but no built in bookshelves except for one small wall-mounted plank between the windows. It was helpfully stocked with a row of pre-approved textbooks. Most glaringly, where the boys had their big screen TV and entertainment center, we had a three piece full-length mirror with ottomans on either side.

It was obvious what our energies were supposed to be expended on.

"I'll leave you to get settled in," Jane smiled benevolently and shut the door behind her.

Once she was gone, I let myself relax a little. It was nice to lose the meek, wide-eyed expression – you know that saying "if you keep making that face it'll stick that way"? Too long looking nervous of everything, and you start to feel nervous.

"There are five separate full-length pieces of reflective glass in here," I said in my normal, irreverent voice, "for two women."

"All I want to know is what the plan is for getting us one of those TVs," Ingrid grumbled, taking her jacket off and hanging it on a peg on the back of the door.

"The office undoubtedly has a list of all the unoccupied dorms in the boys' wing. We'll pick out a room nobody uses and steal a TV while everyone's at a ball or a rehearsal ball or a post-ball brunch," I said, pulling off my riding boots and sitting back on the bed closest to the window. "The question is what to do with the mirror."

"Ten months living in a room that looks like a funeral home for florists," Ingrid inspected the buttercup drapes. She turned to me, gave me an appraising glance, and folded her arms like a professional interrogator. "Those were some smooth moves today. I especially liked the lump in your throat whenever someone mentioned second chances. Are you ever honest about things?"

"You'll notice that I'm being honest right now," I said, "and I was honest with you all day until the pomp-and-circumstance crowd showed up."

"Yeah," she nodded. "I guess you were. Okay _princess_ , what are our long-term mission parameters?"

"For you? Survive the year. Do what you want. Try not to interfere too much, and don't use my title. I like to go incognito among the peasants."

"I think I can handle that," she smirked. "But do me a favour and warn me if I'm getting too close to your firing line. I'd hate to be in caught in the crosshairs of an innocent little sweetheart like you."

She opened a few of the utility doors with a patterned precision, like she was checking for bombs or surveillance equipment.

First closet – empty.

Second closet – empty.

Washroom – gasp-inducing.

I leapt up out of the bed, the wooden floor surprisingly warm beneath my bare feet, and practically slid into the ensuite on reflex. Ingrid was stunned; her mouth slightly agape, her eyes shining with disbelief. In that room was the only object worthy of the sentimental praise heaped upon that school, the one thing of true magnificence to behold within the entire building so far.

An extra-long, extra-deep clawfoot soaker tub with three separate shower attachments and dual taps.

I couldn't stop myself from slowly walking towards it, reaching one hand forward like Sleeping Beauty enchanted by the spinning wheel. I kept thinking _I bet the water pressure is amazing here_.

"That is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Ingrid murmured, still hypnotized. "I am going to fill it with water and spend all night there. Check on me every two hours to make sure I haven't drowned."

"I don't know how you're going to manage that since I'm claiming the tub on behalf of myself, the newly appointed Empress of the Bath."

"You can't appoint yourself empress."

"Of course I can. That's how imperial lines get started, someone says that they're the empress now, and everyone else agrees."

"I don't agree, so you can't be empress because that's _my_ bath."

"No, it's _our_ bath, but I'm always in charge of it, and I get the first bath."

"Pretty sure I can overthrow your tyrannical bathroom regime, I have ten years of mercenary training. I can take you down in a physical fight."

"Are you sure about that? Because I always go for the eyes, and I _will_ bludgeon or stab people with _anything_ on hand."

"You can't bludgeon what you can't reach, shortstop."

"That's a good point. I hope you never took your Achilles tendons for granted, because you're going to miss them."

"Have you ever been thrown out of a four storey window before? It's going to be a memorable experience. While you're in the hospital, I'll send you get well postcards. From the bath."

Looking back, I think this was when Ingrid and I realized we were going to be good friends.

Our argument was put on hold when the door to our room was flung open and a cheery voice called out:

"Knock knock! Welcome wagon!"

Ingrid and I looked at one another with shared bafflement. Back home, people either knocked on a door or they burst in like a pack of thieves. Nobody burst in while pretending to knock with an obvious sound effect.

It was bizarre.

I stuck my head around the door and saw a small gaggle of our fellow students. At the front of the group was a short, curvy blonde with an enormous amount of pin-curled hair and a set of false eyelashes that would put a porcelain doll to shame. I admire women who can put on false lashes and not scratch their corneas or give themselves eye infections, even though I don't share the cosmetic dedication that drives them to perfect that particular skill.

To the left, a girl with pale blue, almost-white hair and large glasses was fidgeting nervously. To the right, a boy and a girl that were either twins or close-in-age siblings waved their greeting. They both had sparkling, cheerful expressions, the same dark skin, and the same caramel coloured eyes.

"We're just admiring this bathroom!" I said, all golly-gees and holy-cows, no doubt looking like a fortune teller's disembodied head. "We didn't have anything like this back on the Isle of the Lost!"

"Who is it?" Ingrid whispered urgently.

I waved her off while I managed a shy blush to imply I felt ashamed of my lack of sophistication.

"Oh, sugar," the blonde cupcake said with enough melodramatic sympathy to fill my new gigantic bathtub. "Well! You are just luckier than a wishin' star on a slow night, because you have the all-time champion bathroom organizer right here! And your basket's got a couple of moisturizers for you gals – we didn't know your skin type, so we went with combination, I hope that's alright – and some fancy little soaps, and some fizzy bath bombs!"

"Bath bombs?!" Ingrid demanded, sticking her head around the door frame just above mine.

The girl with the light blue hair's whole face changed at the sight of her. She now looked extremely determined, like she was about to fight a dragon, or scale an erupting volcano, or some similar feat of life-and-death daring.

"Oh." I heard Ingrid say over the top of my head. "Hi."

"Ingrid Sinclair, my name is Kiki Thatch," the blue haired girl announced, sounding more regal than any of the other princesses I'd met at Auradon. It was a temporary achievement, because the next thing out of her mouth was the longest, most fretfully babbled run-on sentenced I'd ever hear. "I don't know what your mother's told you about what happened in Atlantis, and I saw you at the party and I wanted to say something, but I didn't want you to take it the wrong way, like I was forgiving you, because I can't forgive you, _you_ didn't do anything, and really, what happened between our mothers is their business, so even if I apologized you'd have no right to accept, and then I thought it might be best if we just ignored each other and focused on our academic careers, but then I remembered that I'm taking Pre-Auradonian Historical Cartography this year, and I thought 'I wonder if she's going to choose that for an elective?' and then I was like 'of course she is, Kiki, who's _not_ interested in Pre-Auradonian Historical Cartography? It's a fascinating subject, maybe even the best elective available from the curriculum this year', and I didn't want any old grudges hanging over our heads to distract us, which is why I decided to come and make sure that the past is in the past and that you and I are starting on fair terms."

I had no idea how she managed to get all of that out without pausing to breathe.

Ingrid simply said:

"Okay."

"Oh, that's great!" Kiki sighed, slumping her shoulders forward so that her oversized glasses started to slip down her nose. She pushed them back up and beamed at us.

The cupcake cleared her throat.

"Well now that the air's been cleared," she said, "I'd like to introduce the rest of us properly! I'm Charlotte La Bouff Junior – of course, y'all can call me Junebug, all my good friends do. And speaking of good friends, this is my dearest friend in all the world _Princess_ Naomi of Maldonia, and that's her no good pain-in-the-ass brother Nathaniel, don't pay any mind to him. And Kiki has… made her introductions, but in case you lost some of that in the shuffle, she's the _next queen of Atlantis_."

"Nice to meet you," Naomi chimed in graciously.

"Yes, very nice," her brother winked at Ingrid. "So, what's the situation? Single? Taken? Taken but willing to be unfaithful?"

Ingrid balked.

Junebug's face went two shades darker than the pink of her dress, and she pointed to the exit with cold fury.

"OUT!" She bellowed at him.

"I'm just trying to get to know our new classmates!" Nathaniel protested with mock innocence.

His sister rolled her eyes, then jerked her head in the direction of the door. With a mischievous, hang-dog smile, he slumped out of our room.

"I'm sorry about him," Naomi sighed. "He was a perfectly reasonable young man until one morning two summers ago. He just wandered down to breakfast with his hair slicked up and half a bottle of cologne on, and he's been a walking harassment claim ever since."

"I've got an idea how to fix it," Junebug nodded sagely.

"It's not ethical," Kiki whispered to us.

"Well, it never seems to hurt the dogs at the veterinarian's office too much…"

"So!" Naomi said, clearly eager to change the subject, "Tell us about yourselves!"

We were still standing in the washroom doorway, neither one of us willing to concede territory. Our guests hadn't picked up on it yet, but they were bound to start wondering why we weren't moving around casually.

"We'd love to," I said. "Ingrid, why don't you see what's in our basket while I finish washing my hands?"

"Sure," Ingrid slapped my back like a pal, "wash right up. You've probably got some of your boyfriend's vomit on you."

A look of mild disgust and confusion passed over the faces of our new acquaintances. It was an excellent torpedoing of my planned first impression, very commendable, and the message was clear. If I locked the door and took a bath, who knew what else she might accidentally blurt out? And that's how all kinds of rumours could get started.

I laughed with meek embarrassment.

"He ate too much at the party," I explained. "He was excited to see all the fancy food. And he's not really my boyfriend, just a friend who's a boy."

"Mmm-hmm," Naomi sounded more than a little skeptical, while I turned on the faucet and plotted my next move. "Was he that big bag of muscles that spent the whole brunch standing next to you like a bodyguard?"

"That's him!" Ingrid supplied happily.

"Oh, he's cute!" Junebug cooed, "What's wrong with him? Why's he not your boyfriend?"

"Nothing's wrong with _him_ ," I said with a perfectly modulated catch in my throat. "I just feel like it's not fair to… it's just… if I had a boyfriend or something, everyone would think that it was some kind of trick, or that I didn't really…"

I was in the process of washing my hands, but I could tell the arrow had hit its mark. The other room had gone completely silent.

Of course, the real reason Armand wasn't my boyfriend was because he was entirely lacking in prospects. He was one of five sons set to inherit basically nothing, and he had no imagination for how to claw his way out of the heap. I've always intended to be exactly the kind of person who uses romantic alliances to get ahead, and I've told Armand as much on several occasions. He usually said something like: "Okay, but we're on a date right now, so maybe you're wrong."

Sometimes, I had no idea what to do about him. I wish my father had given me _some_ advice about boys…

"People can surprise you," Kiki said to break the tension. "But, then again, they can also pull your pants down in front of half the school during a fake geology club meeting."

"I think what Kiki's trying to say is there are too many different kinds of people, good and bad, to go around worrying what they think," said Naomi.

"Easier said than done!" Junebug scoffed, "Did I tell you about Suzanne Darling this morning? There I was, all ready for the brunch in that cute little dress I got special, you know the drop waist with the pleated skirt? Well, I thought I looked as gorgeous as you could get. I put on my lucky t-strap shoes and did my face, and I walked past her and that horrible Asherah who's got the room next to mine, and she said – it was sort of like a whisper, but a whisper I was most definitely supposed to hear – she said 'I knew they were letting in more VKs this year, but I hadn't heard we were also getting some of the Hippos from Fantasia'."

"She didn't!" Naomi gasped.

"I thought to myself: 'I'll just show you, Suzanne Darling!' So I held my chin up as high as I could, marched straight into the bathroom and cried off all my eye makeup. Then when I was sure they were gone, I went and changed."

"I would've looked her square in the eyes and told her to repeat that," Ingrid announced, sitting cross-legged on the bed, rifling through our welcome basket. The other girls had arranged themselves on various pieces of furniture around the room.

I hesitated halfway out of the washroom door. Not because of the bath war, that was on hold until the guests left, but because I didn't know what I would've done to Suzanne Darling.

I mean, I knew what I, Greta, Princess of the Southern Isles would've done (told Suzanne it was heartbreaking how she had to lash out at other people, then given her some tips on how to improve things about her looks). But I wasn't totally sure what Greta the noble, sensitive sidekick who attended Auradon Prep would've done.

I suppose I would've had to burst into tears in full view of Suzanne and Asherah, then locked myself in my room and missed the party.

Taking a seat on one of the ottomans by the big mirror (almost the exact same distance from the bathroom door as Ingrid was on the far bed), I let out a sigh of commiseration.

"Let's talk about something more cheerful," Naomi demanded. "What classes are you two taking?"

When it was discovered that we hadn't decided yet, Kiki sprang into an enthusiastic rundown of our options. After around forty minutes of academic planning, the welcome wagon bid their farewells and left Ingrid and I alone in our room.

She was still on her bed and I was still on the ottoman.

Equidistance from the tub.

"I have a proposition," I said, "we flip a coin for who gets to go first."

"That sounds fair," Ingrid replied, watching me like an unblinking hawk. "What's the catch?"

"No catch! I even happen to have a coin right here in my pocket, I'll flip it right now!" I smiled, "I call heads."

Ingrid raised an eyebrow and stood up.

"I'm going to flip a coin that I know isn't rigged," she declared and went to her jacket hanging on the back of the dour to search through the pockets.

I stood up very quietly, padded past the bed and the picked over basket to grab one of the bath bombs, glided back into the bathroom and swiftly but silently shut the door and turned the lock.

Ingrid let out an expert string of profanities on the other side of the door.

She angrily twisted the knob a few times while I turned on the faucet, and she tried to break the door down while I was tying up my hair and looking through the cupboards to find out where the towels were, but it wasn't long before she gave up.

As I slipped into the soothing water and breathed in the delicate fragrance of the bath bomb, I smiled to myself and remembered something my father used to say before his mysterious disappearance:

"Never be a tortoise or a hare when you can be a fox."


	4. Be Our Guest

I exited the washroom in a cloud of steam, wrapped in a fluffy blue robe with the Auradon Prep crest embroidered on the pocket, thoroughly comfortable. Ingrid was sitting on the floor between our beds, surrounded by our luggage, assembling a small firearm.

She gave me an icy glare, and checked the sights of the gun.

"Nice bath?" She asked.

"Very nice. You may now have yours," I said benevolently. "Did someone drop all of this off, or…?"

"A bunch of footmen who looked like they used to be furniture brought it in. Apparently, it would've come sooner, but something was wrong with the door. Nobody searched through any of it, all of my security measures were still intact."

"No, they wouldn't have. Not after we'd been so obviously insecure about leaving it alone," I explained. "The king would've issued special orders that it be treated with extreme care. He's the kind of ruler who needs subtle instructions on what to do. That's probably Queen Belle's real job, puppeteering his reign while posing as his compassionate moral center. Nice work if you can get it."

Ingrid looked at me in what I took at first to be utter disbelief, but then she burst into laughter.

"What?" I asked, confused.

" _Wow_ ," she smiled. "Do you know how heartless you sound? I mean in private, not when you're pretending to be an annoying marshmallow."

"Yes," I said, unfastening a brown leather satchel in search of my toothbrush. "What I don't know is why people are shocked."

When I found it, I ducked quickly into the washroom and tried out our complimentary toothpaste. It was pale pink and tasted a little like lime soda.

"Am I supposed to believe the King and Queen of Auradon are the pinnacle of kindness and true love?" I called back into the other room while I brushed, "Because they started out ruling a sizeable, well-liked kingdom that would've suited anybody for a lifetime, and they ended up forging an alliance between a dozen realms that now swear fealty to them and follow their every change in policy. Risky power-grabs like that aren't for misunderstood village girls and their picture-perfect happily ever afters."

"How much of your day is spent thinking about stuff like that?" Ingrid asked over the sound of her duffel bag unzipping.

"How much of your day is spent thinking about how to respond to a hypothetical crisis?"

"Depends on the day," she said, shoving a large first aid kit under her bed.

And that was the only possible answer. How often does a fashionista think about clothes? How often does an ornithologist think about birds? How often does a mercenary-in-training think about potential dangers, and how often does the sole heir of a disgraced prince think about politics? It depends on the day.

While I set about organizing my own things – mostly books, I counted about seventy-five, it was a shame I had to leave so many at home – Ingrid took her own well-deserved bath. I decided she ought to have the first shower in the morning. Largely because I didn't want the first shower anyway, and she probably woke up absurdly early to exercise. She seemed like a morning work-out person.

I changed into something I felt was more suitable for an evening meal at the cafeteria. A white blouse with lace detailing and a pair of lavender capris. I paired the outfit with gold flower-shaped earrings and pink ballet flats. The shoes had cost me a fortune, pink is not easy to find back on the Isle, but they were a good investment. They were also a half size too big, so in order to stop my feet from slipping out of them, I had to walk more clumsily than I normally did. All taken together it loudly proclaimed _I hate conflict and still own a teddy bear._

Perfect.

By the time the two of us were ready to start heading down to the cafeteria, the hallway outside our door was buzzing with activity. We could hear careless footsteps and friendly laughter as duos and trios of girls hurried by.

"Time to jump in the deep end," Ingrid nodded to herself.

I didn't tell her we'd been in the deep end ever since we crossed the barrier into Auradon. I thought it might be a nice moment for her, realizing that she'd been in danger of drowning for far longer than she suspected. Or, at least, it's always treated like a nice moment in the stories heroes and princesses tell about themselves.

We swung the door open and joined the throngs. There weren't as many whispers floating around behind us as I'd been expecting, but that might've been because everyone was all gossiped out from the garden party. As we neared the spiral staircase that took us in the direction of the boys' wing – with the idea of checking to see if Armand and Cadfael wanted to walk down with us – we heard the unmistakable sound of a trumpet solo.

It was enthusiastic, improvisational jazz. I was pleasantly surprised, because I'd assumed everyone at the school would be into parade marches and classical harpsichord pieces for attracting eligible suitors.

"That's… different…" I tried to look curious but not too intrigued. You never know who might be paying attention to you in a crowd.

"It's got swing," Ingrid admitted.

Just off the bottom of the stairs, Prince Nathaniel of Maldonia was holding court in a very different style than his teachers probably encouraged. His trumpet playing was not only good, it was musically interesting and fun. All around him, a mixed crowd watching with expressions ranging from pedantic annoyance to worshipful devotion. A small group of younger female students seemed particularly excited. It probably had less to do with the music and more to do with undeniable good looks of the musician.

When he noticed us, he stopped mid-note with a halting squeak.

"I've been waiting for you!" He said adoringly, pushing through the crowd, staring at Ingrid's face.

Ingrid's face, by the way, was holding steadfast in an expression of mild disgust.

The crowd who'd been enjoying the music let out a few groans and mutters of disappointment that the concert was over, and started to disperse.

"Ask me for how long," Nathaniel said with a twinkling smile.

"How long?" Ingrid raised an eyebrow.

"All my life," he sighed dreamily.

I was reasonably certain Ingrid was about to knee him in the groin, and that wouldn't have gone well for her. Or me, if I was booked as some sort of accessory to royal assault. I suppose it wouldn't have gone well for Nathaniel, either, but people with pick-up lines that tacky deserve what they get.

"You play very well!" I said politely, pointing to the trumpet in his hand.

"Hmm? Oh, yeah, thanks. An alligator taught me," he rambled off dismissively, never letting his eyes leave Ingrid's face. "I believe we were interrupted earlier before you answered my question…"

Ingrid squared her shoulders and smiled a dangerous sort of smile.

"Nathaniel? It was Nathaniel, wasn't it?"

"I'm so pleased you remembered."

"I'm going to give you a very good suggestion, and I'm going to give it to you just this once. If you don't want all of your teeth shattered like a box of fine china plates being dropped out of a cargo plane, you'll give up on this. Right now."

He blinked, stunned, as she breezed by him and continued down the hallway.

Just as I was heading off to catch up with her, he turned to me and asked:

"Is she always like that?"

"Always," I told him.

"How exciting!" He stared after her with a love-drunk expression, and I left him to make whatever terrible romantic decisions he was obviously making.

The boys weren't in their room when we knocked, so we assumed they'd gone down to figure out the cafeteria seating situation – or to see if showing up early meant you had a better chance of finagling seconds out of the serving staff, if I knew Armand.

We found them at a table towards the back of the room, tucked away in a corner that gave them an excellent view of everything happening in the room while making the two of them seem remarkably inconspicuous. It wasn't hard to guess which one of them had selected the location.

"There they are!" Armand waved at us as we weaved through the crowds.

Once we were close enough, I noticed something completely out of the ordinary for him. There he was, in a dining hall, at a table, but the table was completely bare. Not even a couple of beverages or a share plate of fries.

"You don't have any food," I heard myself saying in total disbelief.

Armand shifted in his seat uncomfortably and glanced towards the service station.

"We went to get some, but it's all… weird," he said. "I don't want to eat it."

"Is it kale or something?" Ingrid asked. I must've shot her a confused glance, because she shrugged at me and elaborated: "Some men have a problem with dark leafy greens."

"It's unicorn," Cadfael explained.

"What? Gross," Ingrid scrunched up her face. "Like the meat?"

"Impossible," I shook my head and spoke softly to avoid being overheard. "There's no way they could butcher enough unicorns to feed this many people. It's probably just horse."

"Babe," Armand grabbed my arm and looked pleadingly into my eyes, "I know sometimes I say I'm so hungry I could eat a horse, _but I don't think I can actually do it_."

I patted his hand consolingly and decided to investigate the food for myself. I left the three of them sitting around the table, watching the crowd with varying degrees of suspicion.

The service counters were decorated in shimmering swags of fabric in purple, pink and white stripes. White electric lanterns hung overhead, and the line of students was long and boisterous. I took a place at the back, and tried to catch glimpses of what was on people's trays as they walked by.

There was a lot of frosting.

"Greta!" A familiar voice called, and I looked to see Jane heading towards me. I smiled like I was relieved to see a friendly face, and glanced nervously at the friend with her.

He seemed to be pulled along in her orbit more than having any sort of destination of his own. It was hard to tell at first if he was our age or younger, he wasn't very tall and he had enormous brown eyes – so doe-like and innocent, if I didn't know better I might've pegged him as the son of Bambi. This was someone who desperately wished to be invisible, according to his body language.

"Hi, Jane!" I laughed awkwardly, "Boy am I glad to see you, there're a million people in here!"

"Don't worry, it's only this hectic for special events. First day back, game days, that sort of stuff," she reassured me. "But I'm so glad I ran into you right now! This is Fletcher White, son of Snow White!"

She somehow pulled the boy behind her forward without touching him. He stuck one hand in his pocket and waved embarrassedly while avoiding eye contact with me. I was fine with that. When I'm tired, my eyes can be a dead giveaway of my… how should I put this? My habits of observation.

"Fletcher is a terrific friend of mine, and he knows all about how hard it can be to, well, _deal_ with life at Auradon," Jane said cryptically. "So if you ever need anything, or you're overwhelmed, and you can't find me or Mom, just ask Fletcher!"

To be perfectly frank, Fletcher looked like he'd rather crawl in a cave somewhere and become a hermit for the rest of his life than answer anybody's questions about library hours.

"Snow White's son?" I asked politely. "Was it hard for you last year? You know, with Evie?"

He shuffled uncomfortably and shrugged.

"Not really," he said. "I mean, it wasn't _great_ , but it was worse having to listen to Doug moon over her all the time. But yeah, water under the bridge, right?"

If Fletcher wanted to ignore the fact that the Evil Queen was married to Snow White's father – the legitimate king and ruler – and produced a daughter who could very feasibly claim to be Snow White's sister, and could also very feasibly claim that a Huntsman had provided proof of Snow White's death, and in so doing propose that the current Queen was not Snow White but in fact an imposter, meaning that the only true successor to the crown was she herself…

Well, that was Fletcher's business, wasn't it?

The line moved forward, and I nodded along while Jane told me all about tourneys and how the school was very proud of its tourney team, and how the team needed cheerleaders, and she was a cheerleader, but tryouts were soon and I should give it a shot, I might surprise myself.

The biggest surprise to myself would be devoting a huge chunk of my time to an extra-curricular activity I cared nothing about.

"I'm not very good at, you know, dancing… or jumping… or holding onto things," I said. "But do you need signs? My calligraphy is _next level_."

I had to learn to forge signatures. It's a long story.

And I find it very relaxing, so on the off chance she actually did need someone to hand-letter a few things, I'd probably enjoy it.

"We need banners all the time!" Jane smiled, "That's great! Oh, but you have to be on Princess Committee for that, I think…"

I should've asked for more information on Princess Committee, and whether or not I was eligible simply by being a princess, but I was suddenly distracted by the sight of the food.

It was like a coffee shop and a box of crayons were fused into a hideous monstrosity by dark magic. Small decorative plaques identified Unicorn Cookies, Unicorn Cupcakes, Unicorn Fudge, Unicorn Milkshakes, and more. And everything – _everything_ – was coloured in purples, pinks, rolled in sprinkles, dusted with pearlescent lustre, or covered in gum paste rainbows. I came very close to losing all pretense of friendliness and loudly demanding what the actual hell was wrong with people in Auradon.

"Everything… is unicorn?" I managed to sound confused, but not in any way disgusted.

I really wish my father could've seen that. Because I most certainly was disgusted. Disgusted and afraid.

"Isn't it fun?" Jane gushed, "The Fairies and Friends Club was asked to help with the welcome back theme, and we thought unicorn was so on trend! You _have_ to try the punch!"

I didn't want to try the punch.

Somehow, in trying to balance the persona I was cultivating and the fact that I had three other people to feed (two of which were athletes, one of which might have been a perpetually starving revenant made out of bones that were thrown in a cauldron), I wound up with two large cups of punch. And a good number of deserts, sandwiches on pastel pink bread I found very unappetizing, several kinds of fruit salad, two sprinkle covered milkshakes, and Jane's reassurance that everyone at my table could come back for more.

"I think we'll be fine with all of this," I smiled.

Cadfael watched me approach the table with obvious, mounting dread. I couldn't blame him, I was carrying a tray overloaded with what looked like the remnants of a coup d'état at King Candy's Castle.

I plunked the tray down on the table and took a seat.

Ingrid looked at the alleged food with open horror.

"What is that?"

"Everything is unicorn," I shrugged, repeating Cadfael's earlier explanation. "It's a theme. All the food has been coloured or styled to remind people of unicorns. Because it's fun."

"It's not fun, it's disturbing."

"I hear the punch is excellent," I shrugged.

"Is it?" Ingrid asked, picking up one of the large clear plastic glasses containing the beverage in question. It was neon pink, and swirls of glitter caught the light as it moved. "Then you should drink some."

"I'm not thirsty," I smiled serenely.

"Really? Then why did you bring so much?" She asked with sarcastic innocence. "Your new friends will be _so sad_ if you don't drink their super special punch!"

I maintained eye contact with her as I took the glass from her hand and knocked back the whole thing.

It was so sweet it burned. I had no idea there was enough sugar in the world to put that much sugar into any one thing. It physically hurt when it hit my stomach.

Ingrid's expression changed from cynical mockery, to reluctant admiration, to medical concern. My face remained neutral throughout the process, at great effort.

"Do you need the hospital?" Armand asked when I'd finished.

"No," I said in my pretty princess voice, "but thank you for worrying."

"What does it taste like?" Ingrid whispered.

"It tastes like rainbows!"

Rainbows that hate you and want you dead.

We picked at the food a little, but no one really touched any of it. I hinted to Armand that perhaps we could all head down to the kitchens later for a raid, but he didn't seem to pick up on the suggestion. He just kept staring at me with deep concern and mouthing the words: "Are you okay?"

"Have you two picked out your courses?" I asked the boys, feeling an unexpected surge of energy. I might've been talking a bit faster than usual, too. "We've got ours pretty much figured out, don't we Ingrid? Apparently the only mandatory one is Remedial Goodness 101, which sounds like it's going to be an enlightening experience. No, not enlightening, I meant to say nice or something equally trite. Is anybody else warm? It's really warm in here, right?"

"Do you want some water?" Armand asked worriedly.

"Pfft! You look so worried! I'm totally fine! Do you guys want to go do something? Like I don't know, just something? We could break into the office and get started on stealing a TV! Seriously, though, they need to put on an air conditioner. You cannot crowd this many people into one room and not ventilate it, that's just unacceptable…"

Later that night, when my heart wouldn't slow down and I couldn't stop sweating, and Ingrid almost called the nurse three separate times, I realized I'd forgotten something my father used to say before his mysterious disappearance:

"Be very careful what you drink."

 **A/N: Hi! It's me, Soda, the very non-Machiavellian writer of the story and unashamed unicorn food lover in real life (but the drinks usually do have like 20kgs of sugar per serving…)! How are you? Good?**

 **First of all, thank you so much for reading my story! I hope you're enjoying it, and I'd love to hear any feedback about why or why not. With D2 dropping tomorrow (yay!) I felt like I should put it on the record that I'm hoping by setting it after Mal and the gang are gone, I can avoid any big inconsistencies. And, in case you were wondering, I** ** _am_** **planning on cameo appearances from the graduated VKs!**

 **Fletcher White is an OC created by Slytherwitch and used with permission. I hope you guys like him, and of course you should check out Slytherwitch's story "The Past Affects The Present and Future As Well" if you'd like to see more of him!**

 **If you've got an idea for an AK you'd like to see walking the halls at Auradon, please share it with me. I have a whole school to populate, so the more the merrier!**


	5. Scales and Arpeggios

I felt terrible.

Physically, I mean. It takes a lot for me to feel terrible emotionally. Although, I did really, really regret drinking a full pint of unicorn punch, so maybe it was both. It was hard to tell while my head was pounding like a timpano.

A few hours after I'd finally fallen into a fitful but greedy sleep, I heard the soft beeping of the alarm. Ingrid started setting about her morning, heading out for a run, heading back in for a quick shower. I meant to sit up, or say something to her, but I was too tired to do anything other than think, and even that was in half-dreamed fragments.

Sometime later, a very soft, lightly perfumed hand touched my forehead and brushed some hair back from my face, then voices murmured to each other just out of earshot.

When I properly rolled out of bed, it was to discover the sun beaming against the back of drawn drapes, giving everything a warm golden glow. The clock said it was around half past twelve.

I swore. Loudly.

Not only had that stupid punch cut into my plans to search the grounds last night, it was setting back my social machinations for that morning. I'd been at Auradon for one day, and I was already one day behind schedule. Unacceptable.

On my nightstand, Ingrid had left a bottle of water, a pair of brown-tinted navigator sunglasses, and a note:

 _Called the medic. Brought FG with her. Consensus is you sleep as long as you need, show up to whatever classes you can. Learned a valuable lesson about daring our tac to drink weird shit. Feel better._

In the bleariness of the moment, it took me a minute to realize "tac" referred to a mercenary group's tactician. When I got the joke, I laughed to myself, and opened the water bottle. I was about to take a swig, but stopped myself. It wasn't that I didn't trust Ingrid, just that I'd determined to not to let my guard down anymore. I sniffed the water, of course there wasn't anything wrong with it.

Getting ready was an ordeal, but I managed despite my internal organs screaming in agony. It wasn't only leftover sugar burns from the punch, it was also the fact that I hadn't consumed anything but the punch since brunch the day before. And even then, I hadn't had much.

I tripped twice putting on a pair of leggings and nearly took out the vanity mirror. Deciding to stick with clothes that wouldn't make me fall down, I opted for my trusty riding boots and a shirt dress. I couldn't figure out jewellery or hair, so I skipped it, threw some stationary into my satchel, grabbed the sunglasses, hoped I looked at least a little naïve or cutesy, and hurried down to the cafeteria to get something to eat before lunch was over.

When I got there, it was almost completely empty. Just a few stragglers before the next bell, and no one I recognized. I convinced the woman at the counter to give me something kind of salad thing wrapped in a tortilla, and checked where I was supposed to be next.

Etiquette and Hospitality with Miss Grimsby.

I ate on the go, hurrying through unpopulated hallways, passing by classrooms that hummed with the gossip of before-class after-lunch boisterousness. I finally got where I was going, and was surprisingly relieved to find a familiar face among my fellow students.

Junebug La Bouff was sitting towards the back of the class, and when she saw me at the door, she raised her hand straight in the air and waved me over to an empty seat next to her with frenetic, but dainty flaps of her hand.

I didn't have the wherewithal to do anything but pull the chair out with a loud squeak and slump down into it.

"Don't say anything, don't move anything, don't even think," Junebug rattled off, "I heard what happened. _Everyone_ heard what happened. We should probably work out a system of blinks for if you need anything. One blink yes, two blinks no, three blinks and a half-wink if you're havin' a seizure."

"Everyone heard?" I squeaked out hoarsely. "What did they hear?"

"That Jane nearly killed you by accident," she whispered as a woman I presumed to be Miss Grimsby crossed the front of the room. "The details are fuzzy, but she gave you something you were allergic to or something and you could've died?"

"Sugar."

"SUGAR?!" Junebug gasped, drawing far more attention to us than I would've like. "You're allergic to sugar?! That's the saddest thing I ever heard in my life!"

Miss Grimsby, a thin middle-aged woman with jagged features and a prominent nose, cleared her throat and glowered at us.

Junebug slouched down behind her desk and chucked embarrassedly.

"I'm so sorry," she smiled. "I'll be good."

It happened that Miss Grimsby was the latest in a long line of royal retainers and ladies' maids obsessed with decorum.

She proudly told us of how her family had served seven generations of some seaside country she forgot to mention the name of, and her father was the first human to serve in the court of a mermaid queen. I was too exhausted to take it all in, but there was an anecdote about forks that was supposed to frighten us. Something about first impressions and state dinners and hair combs.

I had been advised on numerous occasions that very few party guests actually care if you're using the right fork, because they're usually too wrapped up in making sure _they_ use the right fork. I had also been taught the size, shape, and use of every conceivable utensil you might encounter. Even snail forks – which look very much like prosciutto forks, but are in fact _slightly_ smaller.

Long before his mysterious disappearance, my father had explained to me that royal courts have two types of etiquette rules. The first set is to make sure everyone's always comfortable, and no one feels bad. This includes things like not shouting at guests, frowning upon public drunkenness, thanking people, introducing new acquaintances to each other, reasonable stuff like that. Then there's the etiquette of exclusion, a set of rules devised by the more elitist members of the aristocracy in order to embarrass members of the lower classes who find themselves at a fancy party. This includes the aforementioned forks, specific ways of holding napkins, numbers of buttons considered acceptable on sleeves, and so on. Basically, anything that makes a guest's life more difficult for no reason.

Miss Grimsby's Etiquette and Hospitality curriculum was concerned exclusively with the second category.

I decided it would be a fine class to do terribly in. After all, there's nothing notable about a lesser royal from a black sheep family tripping over table linens. Every ball has at least one of those. They're as ubiquitous as retired generals telling long-winded stories nobody cares about.

Miss Grimsby, in the middle of another tale from the annals of Times People Embarrassed Themselves and Everyone Saw, pulled a very large, intimidating binder from within her desk and started making her way towards me.

She dropped the massive volume on my desk with a thunder-crack of a thud. It even managed to bounce a little.

"Seeing as this is your first year with us, Miss Greta," she smiled tightly, "you'll need to catch up. And if Miss Charlotte Junior was any sort of friend of yours, she would've told you that it is most improper to wear sunglasses indoors."

"Oh, but Miss Grimsby!" Junebug protested valiantly, "She's got permission from the nurse!"

If I'd wanted to, I could've mentioned that using the title Miss with our first names was highly inappropriate given our respective backgrounds. I should've been called Milady, and Junebug – as the eldest heir of an influential merchant family – should've been Mademoiselle La Bouff. But I had more important things to do than annoy third-string teachers.

"I didn't mean to be rude," I sounded like I was about to burst into tears. "I was very sick this morning, and the only way I could make it to class was if I wore them, and I thought that I couldn't miss a single one of _your_ lessons if I was going to have any hope of fitting in…"

Miss Grimsby obviously viewed herself as a crucial asset in the lives of her students. She also obviously viewed herself as someone who was taken for granted because her skillset wasn't _trendy_ or _exciting_. She wore her weakness on her sleeve.

"If it's a medical requirement, you may keep them on," she said. "And if you're sincere in your desire to improve yourself, you can do no better than studying that binder. I do not suggest inviting Miss Charlotte Junior assist you, she has a… unique approach to hospitality."

Miss Grimsby returned to the head of the class, and flipped over a chalkboard to reveal a large magnetic diagram of a ballroom. She droned on about the fundamentals of dance attendance, while Junebug whispered to me behind her hand.

"That could've gone much worse! I thought the old buzzard was out for your blood when she started walking over! She hates me because I don't give two figs about old world manners. So long as there's enough food and music and people havin' a good time, you've been a perfect hostess, that's what I think. At my last birthday party, a six tier cake got pushed into a swimmin' pool and Nathaniel wound up with two black eyes. It was wonderful fun."

"My goodness," I whispered back, like I had a fair deal more goodness to swear upon than was strictly the case. "That sounds as wild as an Isle party!"

"Honey, I've never been to an Isle party, but I can guarantee you, my parties are wilder, longer, and have better catering. You best hang on to your hat, because you're invited to the next one."

My eyes would've been watering with boredom by the end of that class if it hadn't been for Junebug's gossip. None of it was malicious and all of it was reported with obvious delight. I learned Nathaniel had spent all of the prior evening describing various aspects of Ingrid's appearance, Kiki was in so many AP classes she had to drop out of two because of scheduling conflicts and she was furious, Naomi was in a constant passive aggressive battle with Suzanne Darling over school council matters – of particular interest because they conducted this right under Jane's nose. Suzanne Darling, it turned out, was one of Michael Darling's descendants (a great granddaughter or great-great granddaughter, Junebug couldn't remember) and she had an inferiority complex because she wasn't from the Wendy line. It was all _much_ more educational than the actual lesson.

We left sharing an honest laugh at one of Junebug's enthusiastic jokes, and I headed off in search of my next class.

Remedial Goodness.

It wasn't something I was looking forward to.

I turned a corner and heard an unmistakable voice bellow:

"Babe!"

Armand pushed his way against the flow of the crowd, knocking a number of students into locker doors and jostling textbooks out of the hands of a few others. He didn't even look at the destruction he left in his wake, he just kept moving towards me.

"I'm fine," I told him confidently. It didn't stop him from holding my chin and trying to inspect my eyes _through_ the lenses of the sunglasses.

"You were so sick this morning," he said, "Ingrid said you spent the whole night saying weird things in your sleep."

He let go of my face and wrapped me up in a suffocating hug, burying my head in his muscular arms, in full view of any members of the student body or faculty that might happen by.

"Armand…" I said, my voice completely muffled by his bulk, "you're squishing me…"

"I had to go to a political science class _by myself_. The teacher hated me because I couldn't remember what an ambassador did."

"I can't see anything but your pectorals."

He finally let go of me, and I gulped in a much needed breath of air. Several passersby shot us openly speculative glances, and I smiled at them shyly. A boy with a gap in his front teeth and a spray of freckles snickered derisively as he went by.

Armand grabbed him by the shirt collar and lifted him off the ground enough for their faces to meet. The freckled boy's toes dangled perilously above the ground, and he shook with wide-eyed terror.

"Problems?" Armand asked him.

The boy frantically shook his head, and Armand let him go. We watched him run down the rest of the hallway like his life was in danger.

"You shouldn't have done that," I said, continuing towards class.

"People here are so rude," Armand replied by way of defense, as he opened the door to Remedial Goodness with a gentlemanly flourish. "They're always _watching_ each other. In a _nosy_ way."

Ingrid and Cadfael were already at their desks inside. There were six places, clearly on purpose and arranged amphitheatre style around the front of the room. I was just beginning the process of wondering about that, when our two classmates noticed us enter.

"There she is!" Ingrid said with guilty cheerfulness, "You made it!"

"Not dead after all," Cadfael noted with a courteous nod.

I smiled as encouragingly as I could manage and took off the sunglasses to hand them back to Ingrid. Her expression was one of concern.

"Why don't you keep those for the rest of the day?" She said diplomatically, then gestured to my eyes, "There's a lot of redness in that... area… of your face…"

"Seriously?" I grumbled, putting them back on and settling into the desk beside her.

"You look like the unicorn kicked you in the face instead of poisoning you," she elaborated.

Armand nodded thoughtfully.

"I'm never forgiving unicorns for this," he declared. "If I ever see one in the wild—"

He lined up an imaginary musket and fired with a shockingly loud sound effect.

"That's so nice," I said, genuinely touched.

"Yeah," Ingrid agreed, "that's sweet."

When the door to the classroom opened with a soft creak, we all turned to see a very tiny girl in colourful cat-eye glasses, with an enthusiastic smile bounce into the room. She was considerably younger than the rest of us, but definitely more self-assured about being there.

"Oh my goodness!" She squealed with delight, "Hello! I'm so excited to finally meet you!"

She bounded into the space between Ingrid and I and started rummaging through a paint-splattered bag she was carrying.

"Hello?" I said with open curiosity.

"Are you meant to be in here, child?" Cadfael asked.

The girl didn't pay any attention to either one of us, she just kept rummaging.

"I did my very best, I only saw you two around the Isle a few times," she looked at me with fascination, "but I always remembered your hair."

" _My_ hair?" I asked, and pointed at Ingrid, "Have you seen _her_ hair?"

"No offense, but it's blonde," the girl told Ingrid. "That's just not very exciting."

"It's naturally blonde," Ingrid said with a little more pride than I would've predicted. "Women pay a lot of money to get this shade."

"Have you ever thought of doing a reverse ombre look instead?"

"I'm not big on things that take a lot of maintenance," Ingrid explained with a shrug.

"You're both very natural," the girl nodded, like she'd been studying us for science. "Here we go!"

She produced two items from inside her bag. The first was a leather cuff bracelet that might have once been a man's belt. It was decorated with military green paint splatter and an old-fashioned cameo of a soldier wearing an infantry helmet. She handed that to Ingrid. The second was a set of hoop earrings with small charms looped on them, including a crown, a cavalry officer, and quite a few…

"Snowflakes!" I said, with as much pleased surprise as I could muster.

"From your father's story!" The girl said proudly.

"Yes!" I smiled, "That was always his favourite part!"

Armand skillfully managed to turn a laugh into a cough, and avoided looking at my present.

"I hope you like them, I spent a lot of time trying to get them right," the little girl said, taking one of the empty desks.

"It's cool," Ingrid told her politely, slipping on the bracelet.

 _Why did she have to put it on?_ I cringed inwardly. Now I had to put mine on. I fastened in the earrings and tried to look as grateful as possible.

Snowflakes.

How wonderful.

Before I had a chance to make up some excuse like my ears being sensitive because I wasn't feeling well, Fairy Godmother arrived with the final member of our class in tow.

He was slouching along resentfully, with a grey wool cap pulled low over his ears and a face that looked like it never did anything but frown.

"Gordon, sit," Fairy Godmother commanded him.

She took her place at the front of the room.

"Glad to see you're feeling better," she said to me warmly. "But given the… punch incident, and the… egg incident, and the… breakfast incident—"

"Breakfast incident?" I whispered to Armand.

"You don't want to know."

"I misunderstood," Cadfael announced loudly in his own defense.

No one ever did get around to telling me what happened.

"I prepared a nutrition guide for you four, just to help you adjust," Fairy Godmother went on, then added, mostly to herself, "It wasn't a problem we had with the last group…"

She handed us a pamphlet with a pair of smiling mice eating pieces of corn on the front. _Food is Your Friend!_ The title loudly proclaimed.

"Now, let me make some introductions!" Fairy Godmother gestured towards the small girl and frowning boy who were strangers among our little group. "I don't know if any of you know Dizzy, but she's here on our very first Auradon-fast-track scholarship! She's a bit young for the full program, so we like to say she's prepping for Prep!"

Dizzy smiled proudly.

Ingrid made a quiet gagging noise that thankfully no one else heard. Although, she probably could've blamed it on something she ate a lunch before we had our humiliating nutrition charts.

"And the final member of our little group is Gordon. Son of Grumpy. He knows why he's here."

Gordon scoffed loudly, rolled his eyes, and refused to look at the rest of us. We all shrugged and silently agreed to just leave him alone.

It turned out that Remedial Goodness was mostly a series of hypothetical problems we had to solve with approved means. The first one went like this:

"You're picking berries in the forest when you realize a wolf is watching you, waiting to attack. You hurry down the path and come to three houses belonging to three pigs. One is made of straw, one is made of sticks, and one is made of bricks. What should you do?"

Fairy Godmother asked for our answers at random. Ingrid was first.

"Most brick houses have a cellar," she said. "I'd break in, and wait out the wolf."

"But that might put the pigs in danger," Fairy Godmother reminded her.

"They're not my pigs."

"We'll come back to that. Let's see if, oh, let's see if Armand knows what to do!"

"Shoot the wolf with my musket," he said breezily. "And then, shoot the pigs and take them back to the village to celebrate my triumph with a roast pork dinner!"

"Do we have guns?" Ingrid said, "Because I need to change my answer."

"No," Fairy Godmother said sternly. "No guns."

Cadfael raised his hand.

"Are the pigs oracular?" He asked, and when Fairy Godmother just looked confused he explained. "Can they see the future? Or are they just regular pigs?"

"They're regular pigs who can talk and sing and dance and build houses," she told him.

"That is _far_ from a regular pig…" he pointed out.

"Greta!" Fairy Godmother said with a tinge of desperation, "Do you have an idea about what to do?"

I did, of course.

With two houses of obvious lesser quality than the brick house, the pigs were clearly locked in to some kind of rivalry. Why hadn't the third pig built obviously wolf-proof houses on behalf of the other two? Clearly there was some resentment at work. The first option would be to alert Pigs One and Two to the coming wolf and convince them to sacrifice Pig Three in order to barricade ourselves in the brick house. The second option would be to simply keep walking, and assume that a bacon buffet of at least two pigs would be satisfying to any wolf, and continue on my way. My choice would depend on how close the wolf was.

"Um, I think I'd just scream 'help, help, a wolf is coming'? And maybe hope that my shouts would alert the pigs, and we could all hide in the brick house together? And I could thank them for their kindness with a pie made from the berries I gathered!"

"That's heading in the right direction!" Fairy Godmother sighed with relief. "I didn't know you could bake, Greta!"

"Oh. No. I can't. But I'd _try_ to make them a pie. Or maybe just some jam?"

"Jelly goes really well with pork," Armand chimed in.

"Wolves don't often attack humans," Cadfael mused. "What is wrong with the beast?"

"Yeah!" Ingrid nodded, "What's up with the wolf?"

"Maybe he's in trouble!" Dizzy chimed in, "Maybe he's not attacking us, maybe he's trying to get our help!"

"What if the pigs are industrializing the forest and chasing away the animals?" I suggested, looking horrified.

"Brick making is a nasty business," Cadfael nodded. "A forge is run no less than a fortnight, and the winds are filled with soot and ash…"

"And if only one of the houses is done, that means they have two more to do!" Ingrid snapped her fingers.

"Think of all that pollution," I gasped.

"Kind of weird that _pigs_ want to live in the _woods_ anyway…" Armand folded his arms and raised an eyebrow. "Let's hear a little more about _that_ , Fairy Godmother."

Fairy Godmother looked incredibly exasperated, while Gordon roared with laughter. I watched our teacher valiantly struggle to regain control over the conversation. It reminded me of something my father used to say before his mysterious disappearance, a piece of advice that would've done Fairy Godmother a world of good that day:

"If you throw a drowning man a rope, make sure you get it back before he has the chance to hang you."

 **A/N: An earlier version of this chapter had some serious formatting issues. Sorry about that, my account has been acting weird. Also, D2 was amazing, right?! Loved it.**


	6. Belle

The weather was nice. A warm sunny day with the faintest hint of a breeze. I'd always liked summer, every year I felt a little sadder to see it go. And before you ask, no. It doesn't have anything to do with a deep-seeded genetic memory about magical snowstorms leading to everyone's downfall. Although…

Huh.

You know what? It actually might.

Armand and I were going to explore the woods after class. I wanted to get a look at the more secluded parts of the grounds, and get an idea of the most inconspicuous route between the school and Belle and Beast's residential castle. The castle was near enough to be considered close to campus, but far away enough that you couldn't get there by accident. Armand was coming with me because he wanted to see a proper patch of woodland.

On the Isle, the "woods" were just a thicket on a hill.

We asked our respective roommates to drop off our bags for us – I decided it was safe to openly trust Ingrid with my things – and headed out through the main corridor.

But nothing at Auradon ever goes smoothly or without interruption.

"You there!" A brusque, commanding voice called in our direction.

"This better not be about us…" I groaned under my breath as we, along with everyone else in the hallway, turned to see what the shouting was about.

It was with great annoyance that I learned it was indeed about us. Or, rather, it was about Armand.

A determined-looking man with a whistle around his neck was ambushing us from the direction of the main office. I'd never seen anyone wearing a whistle on a string before. I wondered at first if it had something to do with Peter Pan.

As it turned out, this was Coach Jenkins. Through no intent of his own, I will always despise Coach Jenkins. The man would become unrivaled in his ability to inconvenience me. But this was my first time meeting him, so I didn't know enough yet to be deeply, _deeply_ annoyed by his existence. ("Just go die, Coach Jenkins" would become something of a group slogan later on.)

"You! Right there!" He called again, this time pointing at Armand like a policeman calling out a criminal.

Armand pointed to himself as if to verify, while I wondered what he'd done while I was sleeping in. There was no shortage of weird random ways he could get himself into trouble. Once, while he was bored, he stole a tree. He couldn't explain his thinking to me at all. It was a peach tree. It's still behind Gaston's Beer and Boar back home.

"How come I don't know who you are?" Coach Jenkins demanded.

"Because… I'm new?" Armand ventured.

"We just transferred from the Isle," I added with an apologetic laugh. "We didn't do anything wrong, did we?"

Coach Jenkins looked puzzled.

"I didn't see any VKs on my sign-up sheets," he frowned, talking to Armand like I wasn't even there. "What do you play?"

"I'm not a musician," Armand shook his head.

"Musician? No! I mean tourney! You know, what _sports_ do you play?"

Realization dawned on Armand. He smiled with the gracious sympathy of someone who's decided the other person doesn't know they're asking a silly question.

"Right. Sports," he said, letting out a long sigh while he decided how to explain himself. "I don't really like rules. Or being yelled at. I mean, obviously I keep fit – this temple doesn't maintain itself. But I'm more of an intellectual than a jock."

It was, in its own funny way, accurate.

All of the Gaston boys could throw a punch (or steal a fully grown peach tree), but Armand was considered the brainy one of his pack of brothers. He liked the quieter family pursuits: the solitude of hunting and fishing, going for long hikes, doggedly pursuing the most literate girl in his social circle. He was one-for-seventeen at the family wrestling matches, to the chagrin of his father, but he could also lift an entire bench full of people if you asked him to, and he had a two hour workout regimen he did every night without fail.

Truly, he was a man between worlds.

"Son," Coach Jenkins said sternly. "Look at yourself. You can't not play sports. That's like slapping this school in the face after everything it's done for you."

"…But I don't like sports?" Armand looked at me for help.

"We weren't told we had to participate in specific programs," I said with wide-eyed meekness.

In fact, the only conditions of our being at Auradon were obeying the school rules, keeping to the spirit of the school charter, and completing a full academic year of ten classes. We didn't have to participate in any extra-curricular activities or attend any Auradon Prep hosted events outside of school hours if we didn't want to.

Coach Jenkins could not _make_ Armand join a team.

Apparently, this was a problem.

He demanded we (by which I mean Armand, I might as well have been invisible) come with him to the office. I couldn't see how to get out of it without tipping at least one hand, so we went along. I wasn't pleased. I was already behind on my plans, and I needed to get into the royal castle. I wasn't there for pep rallies, or to be the star quarterback's girl from back home who diligently waits by the sidelines while he winks at the cheerleaders.

The administration offices at Auradon Prep were clean, quiet, and had the charmless character of every other space in the building. There was intricate wood moulding, polished desks, doors with name plates on them, and a top-of-the-line photocopier, by which trusty office volunteer Asherah was standing.

She lit up with malicious glee when she saw us being marched to Fairy Godmother's office.

"Oh no," she cooed, "You two aren't _in trouble_ are you?"

"They're not in trouble," Coach Jenkins told her. "We're just having a talk about the athletics program."

Why he felt he owed Asherah an explanation on our behalf is beyond me. Maybe he thought he was helping. Men who obsess over games and trophies tend to miss the subtleties of social intrigue. If he hadn't opened his big dumb mouth, I could've looked terrified and started to sob that I didn't _know_ if we were in trouble or not.

Instead I had to smile cheerfully and tell her:

"I like your nail polish, that's such a pretty colour!"

She extended a hand and admired her own nails with great satisfaction.

"It's cute, right? I'd lend it to you, but I don't think it would go with your skin tone."

"Probably not," I said self-effacingly. "I have a hard time shopping, because all the nail polish colours that look good on me come from really expensive brands. Way out of my budget."

I enjoyed watching Asherah's face fall as she tried to work out whether I'd insulted her on purpose or not. She gathered up her papers from the copier and hurried away without a second look at us.

Armand glanced sideways at me with the face he makes when I thinks I've been particularly precise with my shots.

"We don't like her?" He mumbled under his breath as Coach Jenkins knocked on Fairy Godmother's door.

"No," I mouthed as I shook my head.

"Come in!" Fairy Godmother called cheerfully. When Coach Jenkins opened the door to reveal the two of us standing there, her smile faltered.

It had only been half an hour since we last saw her, trying in vain frustration to get our Remedial Goodness class to stop speculating on the current wolf population in Auradon, and drop our conspiracy theories about brick manufactures. It was good fun at the time, but now that we needed her on our side, I realized we were going to have to take it a little easier on her.

She was eating a salad out of a plastic container, and she dropped the whole thing on her desk and stood straight up. You would've thought she'd gotten an electric shock from her chair.

"Oh no," she said with anxious exasperation, "what did they do? Did they eat something? Did one of them swallow a whistle? Is she hurt? Was he making a scene?"

That was illuminating.

It's always good to know exactly what someone in a position of authority thinks of you. And, if that barrage of panicked inquires implied anything, it was that Fairy Godmother thought of me as someone with a slapstick propensity for getting in over my head, while Armand was some kind of terrifying natural disaster.

Good. That was more than workable.

"No…" Coach Jenkins said with obvious confusion. "It's just that this boy—"

"Armand!" I chimed in.

"Arnold here," he went on, "doesn't want to join the tourney team. And he says he doesn't have to."

Actually, you might recall, _I_ said he didn't have to, but then I couldn't fight an imaginary dragon with a lacrosse stick, or whatever tourney players do, so I didn't exist in Coach Jenkins's world.

Fairy Godmother was at a loss. She opened her mouth to say something, closed it again, thought for a moment, then looked at Coach Jenkins like she didn't believe he was talking to her about this.

"He _doesn't_ have to," she said.

"I think he should."

Fairy Godmother nodded slowly, then smiled at Armand.

"You don't want to join the team?" She asked him.

"No, I don't think it would be fun or interesting," he told her flatly.

"He has to," Coach Jenkins said. "He's here on a special program, it should be a condition of that program."

"I'm not going to kick him out of this school because he doesn't want to play for the Knights!" Fairy Godmother was aghast at the suggestion. "Besides, if I made it a condition for him, I'd have to make it a condition for all the Isle students, and, believe me, you don't want that."

Ingrid wouldn't be so bad on a sports team, but she was right about Cadfael and, of course, me. I had no idea if Cadfael could catch or throw, but he certainly wouldn't care about following instructions on the field. Chances were good if he disagreed with a play, he'd just put the ball down and walk away without explanation in the middle of the game. As for me, I wasn't being particularly deceitful when I told Jane I lacked the coordination to be a cheerleader. In all honesty, I only had experience with equestrian sports. By which I mean, we had a horse and sometimes I brushed him.

"Then make up different conditions for the other ones," Coach Jenkins suggested, like it was some brilliant idea. "Make it so one of them has to join the Science Club and the other one has to join the Debate Team or the Acapella Group or whatever. I need this boy on my team. We lost three of our best players to graduation last spring."

He said the word _graduation_ like a nurse would say _tuberculosis_.

Fairy Godmother obviously decided that this was going to quickly devolve into a heated argument between co-workers, and maybe students shouldn't overhear it. She ushered us out of the room to a small sitting area, probably for complaining parents or visiting speakers, and shut the door behind her as she returned to duke it out with the coach.

We waited. And waited.

There was a small bookshelf built into the wall across from us. I began scanning the titles for something interesting.

 _Academic Blessings: A Fairy's Guide to the Gifts of Education_ , _Even Kings Get Scared_ , _Giving Up is For Rookies: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Teens_ , _Damsels in Distress: The Self-Esteem Crisis Hitting the Next Generation of Princesses_ , _A Spoonful of Sugar for the Teenage Soul_ …

"All of those books look _awful_ ," I sighed.

Armand nodded distractedly.

"I don't like sports," he shook his head.

I patted his hand and got up to go pick something to read while he worried.

I settled on a book Ariel had written called _Singing with Your Own Voice_. It turned out to be a self-help guide for people who were afraid to go after their dreams. The cover was pretty, and I thought I might benefit from getting a sense of mermaid culture. It would make handling Asherah easier.

Ariel was a shockingly good writer.

All of her advice was either absolutely useless to me or something I considered to be common knowledge, but the book wasn't nearly as terrible as I thought it was going to be. I found myself unexpectedly caught up in her anecdotes about dark undersea magic.

We'd been waiting for about half an hour when Armand kicked his boots off and stretched out over the chairs.

"Stop reading and rub my feet," he demanded, kicking my arm playfully with his sweaty sock.

"Of course! Just let me finish this chapter," I replied back sweetly. I was deeply invested in a story about an octopus who acted as a sign language interpreter for a deaf mermaid.

It's important to understand that neither one of us was serious. My sweetness had all the authenticity it you've no doubt come to expect, and Armand often did that joke when he sprawled himself across furniture. Whoever was nearest to his feet would be subjected to the halfhearted demand.

Unfortunately, he's not one to take in his surroundings. Most of the time, when he's with me, I have that sort of thing covered, but I was foolishly enjoying Ariel's damn book. Neither one of us realized Queen Belle was passing through the office, until she cleared her throat in our direction.

Armand sat up sharply, as though caught naked.

In a split-second it occurred to me that this was horrible. Belle looked like she was about to scold the both of us to hell and back. We certainly couldn't afford to have her thinking Armand joining the tourney team would be a good "change of focus" for him. I needed to smooth things over, fast.

I turned my head and smiled at her as fondly as was humanly possible. I pictured old books, new boots, my favourite childhood teddy bear, tall green grass, all-you-can-eat-shrimp-night at Ursula's Fish and Chips, the smell of father's shaving kit, baby panthers, freshly washed linens, the new fancy bathtub, absolutely anything that made me remotely and truly happy.

"Hello!" I said like I liked Queen Belle. Like I liked her _so_ much, and it was such a nice surprise she was there.

It must've been even better than I was hoping, because Armand balked at the sound, and Belle's whole demeanour softened from chastisement to… sadness. That was unexpected.

"Greta, dear," she said kindly, "can I speak with you for a moment?"

"Alright," I said, shutting the book over a finger to keep my place.

"Alone." She gestured that I should get up and follow her.

I could feel Armand's concerned gaze burning into the back of my head as I left. He was probably convinced she was separating us so the Beast could murder him without witnesses. He had an amazing ability to come up with fears that were as irrational as they were weirdly plausible.

Queen Belle led me over to her private office on campus. It had enormous windows with a ground-level view of rolling fields leading towards a sparkling lake, dark wood paneling decorated with rose carvings, and a much more impressive collection of books than what was in the waiting room. I idly wondered how easy it would be to break the lock, and how often she did an inventory of her titles.

She motioned for me to sit, and took her place behind the desk.

Belle was the first royal with an actual kingdom I'd ever met face-to-face. Everyone on the Isle had forfeited their lands or, like my father, were so far away from a chance at inheriting it didn't even matter. But Belle was the real deal. An actual living example of someone who dealt daily with the machinations of politics. I worried about there being a significant difference between theory and practice, because I had very little real royal-level practice.

I also worried that she'd be able to _see me_ , now that it was just the two of us.

Rather than fight it, I let myself look as nervous as I felt.

"I'm sorry!" I blurted. Partly because I thought it might put her off-balance, and partly as an earnest apology to all of my dead ancestors.

There I was, sixteen and practically grown, face to face with a reigning monarch, and I wasn't sure if I was going to be able to handle it. Pathetic.

"Why are you sorry?" She asked with a curious laugh.

"I… don't know?"

"You're not in trouble," Belle smiled patronizingly. "I'm just concerned about some choices you seem to be making. This might surprise you, but I think you're a lot like I was at your age."

"I don't think so," I said embarrassedly, looking at the hands folded in my lap, trying to muster a blush. Blushing on cue is nearly impossible, but it can be done.

"Everyone in my village used to tease me for reading," she said. "I had this one favourite book, I read it over and over again. There was a daring prince and far off adventure, and everything I thought I wanted in my life. Do you have a book like that?"

"Yes," I said, frantically trying to recall anything remotely like that in my father's library. "It's about this girl, she's the daughter of a wizard who swears a vendetta on this prince. Anyway, one day the wizard finds out that the prince has fallen in love with a maiden he happened to transform into a swan because of a totally different vendetta. So he sends his the girl, his daughter, in disguise as the swan to trick the prince, only she really falls in love with him. But she knows he's not really in love with her, so she tells him the truth. He gets furious and rushes off to find the real swan, who happens to be dying of loneliness, and then he kills the wizard, but gets wounded in the battle and dies in the girl's arms. And she's… you know… alone and miserable forever…"

 _Damn it, Dad!_ I thought to myself, _You couldn't have_ _ **one**_ _book where things worked out?!_

"That's… a very unhappy ending," Belle nodded thoughtfully.

"Well, at least the girl is happy in the middle when the prince thinks she's the swan and loves her back!"

Belle looked very sad for me. In all honesty, I would've been very sad for me if I'd been in her shoes. It was almost _too_ pathetic a thing to say.

"Greta, I have a special book lovers club that I do with a few students who enjoy reading as much as I do. Every other month, we choose something for all of us to read, and then I have a small party at my castle where we discuss our opinions," she told me. "I think it might be nice for you to… expand your social circle while you're here. Do you think it's something you might enjoy?"

It was such an effort not to smirk triumphantly.

An actual invitation to Belle's castle. To go right inside, as invited. I'd never been so grateful for Armand's stinky feet.

"That sounds…" I gushed, as if overwhelmed by her kindness. "That sounds _amazing_!"

"Oh, good! I just feel like you really need friends who can show you how much you're worth. People who can help you understand just how amazing you can be, because you have so much potential. I think you might find out that you've been selling yourself short."

I fully meant to nod with adoring gratitude, like _Oh, Queen Belle, I admire you so much, thank you for sticking your nose into my business and appointing yourself my mentor!_

But something else happened. I remembered that I did have someone, once, who believed in me and looked after me and made sure I made the right choices. And he was gone. He'd gone to Auradon to find something, something he said would make our lives better forever, and he'd never come back.

I was shocked to feel the tears roll down my cheeks. They weren't dainty princess tears, they were big round blobs. I wished I'd kept Ingrid's sunglasses. I wished I could stop myself from crying. But I was suddenly thinking about something my father used to say, long before his mysterious disappearance:

"Hold my hand, we're crossing this street."


	7. Friends on the Other Side

I was given a very pretty handkerchief, told I was to keep it, and directed to a more private staircase that would lead me in the general direction of the dormitories. I couldn't bear to go back to Armand in genuine tears – he had an uncanny knack for telling the difference between a real cry and a fake one – so I followed Queen Belle's directions.

It must've been light-headedness from being sick that made me so upset, I decided. Or maybe sensory overload. I'd been taken across a golden bridge, toured around a school, plunked into new classes, introduced to dozens of new people, all while trying to keep my ship on a steady course. Maybe this was a warning sign that I needed to take things more slowly.

When I finally got back to the dorm, a tear-stained mess of stray thoughts, I found Ingrid hosting Naomi, Kiki and Junebug. They all looked at me, and as a collective group titled their heads to one side as if to silently ask: "What's wrong."

"Long day," I told them quietly, heading straight into the washroom to splash cold water on my face.

Ingrid was soon slouching against the doorway, keeping an eye on me.

"I though you guys were going to the woods?" She asked, as round one of the interrogation.

"Plans changed," I shrugged.

"Did you get into an argument?" She ventured.

"With Armand?" I scoffed, "No. When that happens – this is your fair warning – he'll be standing outside the door repeating the word 'babe' until I forgive him. He sounds like a seagull, it's _incredibly_ annoying."

Ingrid laughed, then tilted her chin at the handkerchief I'd put beside the sink.

"Tell me later?" She said very quietly, so as not to be overheard by our guests.

I nodded.

Once I'd freshened up and tossed my hair into a ponytail, I rejoined the ladies of Ingrid's court with as much of an apologetic smile as I could muster. I was still feeling quite sad, which was unusual given my habit for compartmentalizing emotions until appropriate times.

Kiki smiled up at me and said:

"I brought you something!"

"You did?" I asked, puzzled.

"The amount of gifts you people give," Ingrid teased with a smirk and eye-roll. "No wonder the crime rate is so low in Auradon. All you have to do is wait ten minutes and a kind-hearted princess will give you whatever you need."

"Did you… put snowflakes on it?" I ventured, as Kiki came over and gave me a small suede pouch.

"Why would she put snowflakes on it?" Naomi shook her head.

"Dizzy Tremaine gave her snowflake earrings," Junebug said authoritatively. "Absolutely everybody's talkin' about it."

"That was like five minutes ago!" Ingrid declared indignantly, "How the hell is _everyone_ talking about it?!"

"Welcome to Auradon Prep," Junebug shrugged.

"I didn't put any snowflakes on it," Kiki said. "Oh! But it does kind of look like a piece if ice, but that's more of a coincidence than anything else. After all, glaciers are technically geological formations, but don't think of it like that, because it's just a—"

"A crystal!" I finished for her, as I emptied the contents of the pouch into my hand.

It was a clear piece of something like quartz, sharpened to an oblong point, fastened to a thin chain. It felt strangely ancient in my hand, like the heirloom cavalry swords and medals that had been passed down for generations, now locked safely in hidden caches while I was away from the Isle. I had the strangest feeling that it, chain and all, was the oldest thing I'd ever touched.

Made all the more stranger by the obvious knowledge that any rock you touch is millennia older than everything else around it. Rocks are old. But this one had the unmistakable aura of a rare treasure.

"It's Atlantean," Kiki explained, pushing her slipping glasses back up. "They say outside of Atlantis, it doesn't really do anything, but back home they have healing powers and all kinds of stuff. I have five my mother gave me to give out to friends, and up until now, I only gave two away…"

Junebug and Naomi reached into their shirts and pulled out their Atlantean crystals to display.

"I gave one to Ingrid, too!" Kiki smiled enthusiastically.

"I have mixed feelings," Ingrid confessed.

" _Water under the bridge_ ," Kiki told her sternly. "I think your mother's going to be happy to know we've made friends."

"You know what? Probably," Ingrid shrugged, looking a little surprised with herself.

I stared at the necklace. It really was beautiful.

"We just met," I shook my head, and tried to give it back to her.

"I know," she nodded, "But I can tell."

The last thing I want to do is report this to you, but I started to cry again. I honestly have no idea why. If you're thinking I felt guilty about something, you're wrong. I hadn't done a single thing to deceive Kiki, apart from the usual cheerful over-enthusiasm you get in any new friendship. I think it was probably residual emotional weirdness from the Belle incident. At any rate, I soon found myself being ushered into the washroom by Ingrid's bossy shoves.

"Alright," she was saying, "you're still exhausted from the sugar poisoning, back to the sink."

"I forgot about that!" I heard Naomi calling to me, "you poor thing! I'm not in the least bit surprised it happened, the food here is terrible!"

"Naomi!" Junebug scolded.

"Don't even pretend it's not gross and sad," Naomi shot back. "Every meal is a selection of teeny tiny sandwiches, and those over-baked macarons everybody goes nuts for just because they're pretty. A _real_ macaron is a wonderful thing, but you're not finding one of _those_ here…"

"I do miss food," Junebug confessed in a dramatic gasp.

"We all need to eat!" Naomi decided, "That's why everyone is being so… emotional! All of us! I scared the hell out of Jasper Hawkins this morning when he asked me about committee. I was _this close_ to smacking his textbooks right out of his hand."

"Jasper talked to you?!" Kiki said with a surprising urgency, then cleared her throat, "Cool."

"See? Even Kiki's getting weird," Naomi gestured to her as evidence of our maddening hunger. "As the highest ranking royal in this school – no offense to Atlantis's political isolation or the abundance of potential rulers of the Southern Isles – I decree we all break into the Home Ec kitchen and make something that ain't fancy, ain't lacey, is real spicy, and _fills us up_. Any ladylike protestations of portion size will _not_ be tolerated, and hilarious farts are encouraged."

"I like everything except the farting," Junebug nodded in agreement. "Let's go."

The Home Economics classroom turned out to be right next to the chemistry lab, which was a disaster in waiting if I ever saw one. Sneaking down was not a quiet or particularly stealthy affair, with five of us in total, and Junebug having a fun but noisy habit of spouting random pieces of gossip about the various rooms we passed.

Naomi rattled the lock in frustration, then kneeled down to examine it.

"I heard somewhere you can open one of these with an ID card," she muttered, "but I don't know how."

It was not a complicated lock, it was just the kind you twist on the inside and open with a small key on the opposite side.

"Got a pocket knife?" I asked Ingrid. She handed me a rather nice one with several attachments.

I politely motioned Naomi aside, stuck the end of a small file into the top of the key hole, pushed up on the tumblers, and turned. The door opened with a breezy, welcoming friendliness.

"Good bless your troubled upbringin'!" Junebug cheered as she jumped up and down and clapped.

Everyone hurried in to get started, except for Kiki who held me back with a hand on my shoulder. She gave a furtive glance down the hallway.

"How do you feel about breaking into the resource room of a library after hours?" She whispered.

I couldn't help but smile my natural, vulpine smile before catching myself.

"We'll talk," I assured her with a nod, before we joined the others.

The process of cooking what turned out to be an amazing jambalaya was messy, loud, and silly. I was stunned beyond all reason we didn't get caught, but maybe it had something to do with the time of day. We broke in just as everyone was heading in the other direction to the actual cafeteria, I learned, and by the time we were eating, we'd quieted down and everyone else was on their way back to the dorms.

"This was so necessary," Naomi nodded proudly, taking another forkful of her delicious creation.

The recipe had come from her mother, who was something of a lifestyle and food guru. Apparently, she had a magazine and several high-end restaurants alongside being queen. I'd only ever seen her on television, when she and Naomi's father arrived at fancy events, but she sounded very down-to-earth from what Naomi said.

"Mrs. Potts is going to murder us," Junebug declared, hopping up to sit on one of the counters. "We're really not supposed to cook out of this pantry without permission, and we took stuff out of the fridge, and we're unsupervised."

"She's not going to know," Naomi shook her head.

Kiki cleared her throat.

"She _might_ notice that all the shrimp is gone…" she suggested.

"Just blame me," Ingrid threw in. "I'm a bad influence."

"No, I can take the heat for this," Naomi nodded. "Worst thing they'll do is call my parents, who'll come down to the school and hear the story of how Greta almost died and how I was worried about the VKs getting a square meal, and then they'll buy replacement groceries, and I'll have to work off the cost some way or another. It's really not so bad."

 _If we clean everything really thoroughly, put everything back exactly where we found it, bleach off all our fingerprints and lock the door when we leave, she won't be able to prove a thing_ , I thought. But I decided it might be a little unnerving to announce such meticulous knowledge of how to cover one's tracks.

Instead I caught Ingrid's eye while I said:

"This has been so nice, but you three have to let us do the cleaning up. It's only fair."

"Absolutely," Ingrid nodded, "we did hardly any of the cooking, it's the least we can do. You guys run along, and we'll catch up with you tomorrow."

After some half-hearted protestations, our friends on the right side of the law bid their farewells and headed off. Once alone, Ingrid and I immediately filled two large sinks with very hot water and set about looking for disposable gloves.

Along the way, we found a popcorn machine.

"That does it," Ingrid declared as we looked it over, "We're coming back here. This is going to be a regular thing."

While we eliminated all evidence of our identities, including reshuffling the contents of the cooler so it wasn't immediately obvious what ingredients were now missing, I told her about my encounter with Queen Belle. I told her all about my encounter with Queen Belle, including why I'd started to cry. She listened thoughtfully, bleaching down the handles of cupboard doors.

"How long ago did your dad…" she hesitated to finish the question.

"Four years," I told her. "I couldn't figure out a way to get off the Isle before now, otherwise I would've started searching sooner."

She was quiet for a little while, and I could tell she was thinking.

"My mom signed me up for this program," she finally said. "She said everyone should do at least one thing in their life that completely sucks, just to prove to themselves what they can live through. It builds character. Suckiness builds character. And one day, when you've got more character in your little finger than some of these princesses have in their whole bodies, you'll think back on this time as the days you earned your stripes."

"Stripes would be good," I said with an exaggerated touch of ambition. "Strong military leaders garner a lot of affection from the people. It's a great jumping-off point for a revolution."

"I don't know," she teased back, "Shere Khan had stripes and look how badly he did."

"That's because he was unfocused. Couldn't make up his mind. Did he want to be in charge of the jungle? Did he want to kill the man-cub? Was he trying to discredit Bagheera? What was the big picture, Shere Khan?"

"He was no Scar, that's for sure."

"He was _no_ Scar."

By the time we were done with the place, no police force in the world would've been able to say conclusively who had raided the pantry. All Mrs. Potts could do was speculate and suspect, and even then she'd probably be wrong, because with the dishes put back so flawlessly, there was no way to guess how many students might have been involved.

Ingrid locked the door behind us, and we dropped our disposable gloves into a trash can on another floor.

I felt very satisfied and relaxed. It's funny, sometimes you don't realize how hungry you are until you've finally had something to eat.

When we got to the hallway outside of our dorm room, we both stopped and exchanged a concerned glance. There were sounds coming from inside. I honestly couldn't remember whether or not we'd locked the door behind us, but the sounds weren't the furtive whispers and squeaking of drawers one might expect from thieves and snoops.

Instead, it sounded like furniture being dragged along the floor, and someone hammering nails into place.

Ingrid slid up against the wall, her pocket knife appearing in her hand with lightning speed. She put one hand on the knob, and with the other put a finger to her lips to signal me to be quiet.

I raised an eyebrow at her.

She was being a _little_ dramatic.

She flung the door open, and when nobody shot at her and the noises died down in confusion, we looked in to see what was going on.

"Hey!" Armand said absent-mindedly, two nails in between his lips, a hammer poised over a brand new set of bookshelves he was mounting to the wall.

Cadfael was lounging on top of my bed, reading through one of my books – the cover said _Tiara Wars: The Ultra-Glam Rivalry that Changed Royal Fashion_ , but it was really _A Promising Career_ , an essay collection about the social factors leading to Claude Frollo's downfall.

"I'm borrowing this," he told me without looking up.

Two other boys were in there with them, in the process of moving one of the vanities, which it appeared they'd taken the mirror off of. One of them was Nathaniel, the other I didn't recognize.

"What's going on?" Ingrid demanded.

"We were looking for you," Armand explained, "but nobody was here. And then I noticed they forgot to put bookcases in your room, and I thought 'that's not going to work', so Cadfael said I should go to the woodshop and steal some supplies. When I got back, Nathaniel was waiting for you with…"

He pointed the hammer at the unknown member of their party.

"Khuno!" The boy introduced himself with a dramatic bow, then whispered to Nathaniel out of the side of his mouth. "Which one is she?"

"Blonde one," Nathaniel answered quickly in a sharp, self-conscious whisper.

Armand continued his explanation:

"I thought if they were here, they might as well help, and they did. They made one of the weird mirror tables into a desk."

"You have an enviable bathtub," Cadfael added.

"Oh, yeah," Khuno nodded, "all the girlie rooms have terrific tubs! We dudes just get showers, like we're muddy animals being hosed down. Super unfair. I complain about it all the time. So… Blonde One, nice to meet you…"

Ingrid blinked at him in annoyance.

"Who or what is he?" She asked Armand.

"All I asked him was whether he could lift furniture. He said he could. It was kind of a lie," he shrugged. Then he turned to me and motioned at Cadfael, "I told him not to go through those."

He seemed more subdued than usual, like his mind was on something else. I went over to admire the shelves he was building.

"They're just what I need," I smiled. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," he shook his head. "How did it go with you-know-who? Did she… tell you to break up with me?"

So that was it. There's no denying it was a valid fear, Belle had come as close to making that recommendation as she could without saying the actual words. Of course, you can't break up with someone you're not officially dating, so _everyone_ was being silly.

"She wants me to join a book club, it's not a—"

"She made her cry," Ingrid interrupted. "She was very upset."

Armand looked horrified.

"Technically, that is true," I said, "but I'm much more interested in how it went with Fairy Godmother and the lunatic wearing a whistle."

"Did Belle hit you?" Armand demanded.

"Why on earth…?! No, she did not _hit me_. She just wanted me to join a book club."

"Having seen the sorts of books they have here," Cadfael threw in, "and having gone through your collection, I can see why you wept."

Armand let out a heavy sigh and looked at me skeptically. I could tell he was about to start issuing orders about how I was to cut back on, as he called it, scheming. If Ingrid was keen to see a living example of the big-fight-followed-by-seagull-whining, she'd get her chance if I didn't change the subject soon.

"So, the thing with Fairy Godmother?" I repeated, "How did it go?"

It was a good move. I could see the wheels turning inside his head. How could he tell me not to scheme and then report bad news of a situation where he was alone and scheme-less?

He hesitated for a long silence.

"Awful," he finally confessed. "All VKs have to join one extra-curricular activity now. It doesn't matter which one, but I have to at least _consider_ sports and go to the sports place to see how they're done."

Every VK in that room, including me, visibly cringed at the report.

"That's not so bad!" Khuno waved off the grim atmosphere that the room took on after the announcement, "There are tons of different clubs. You guys can all join the Khuno Appreciation Society. We just sit around and talk about me. It's mostly freshmen who idolize my achievements, but all are welcome."

"What kind of sad little freshman would idolize _you_?" Ingrid asked, eyebrow raised.

"Ah-ah! You don't know who I am!" Khuno wagged his finger, " _I_ am the future emperor of the Kingdom of the Sun, heir to Kuzcotopia, and owner of an iguana named Chubsy! When I was born, they made a solid gold replica of me as a baby!"

"That's terrifying," Cadfael decided.

"Terrifying _and_ impressive!" Khuno replied smugly, "So, Blonde One, you're off the market, but Other One…"

He did this very strange strut over to me, while I was standing next to Armand who was obviously holding a hammer. No one in that room could say Khuno lacked confidence.

"If you ever want a shot at being Empress of Everything, and you like iguanas, I wouldn't be against getting a coffee and seeing where things go."

I was about to make my reply when Nathaniel hurriedly called Khuno back over to him. He whispered something in his ear, and while he did, Khuno took in a wide-eyed look at Armand, who was now purposefully flexing the muscles in his arms while he folded them across his chest.

"On second thought," Khuno announced, "I think I _would_ be against getting a coffee and seeing where things go! Sorry, Other One, I like to keep my face unbruised and my bones unbroken!"

He shot two finger-guns at me and winked.

I wasn't too pleased with how that had gone. I _totally_ wanted a shot at being Empress of Everything. I was about to tell him I'd love to go for coffee sometime. Apart from the fact that I found his mannerisms remarkably odd, he was everything I was looking for.

We spent the evening turning the room into something more functional, with a good deal of help from the guys (excluding Cadfael who just kept reading). Khuno turned out to be an intriguingly well-informed resource of where stuff nobody used was kept. We even managed find a punching bag for Ingrid's half of the room, and a smaller television more suited to our space in one of the storage rooms he showed us.

"Y'all can join Jazz Club," Nathaniel mentioned, helping me stock the bookshelves with my collection. "Can Ingrid sing?"

"Ingrid, can you sing?" I called over to her while she and Armand were putting in the hook for the punching bag.

"Not at all," she called back.

I shrugged an 'oh well' at Nathaniel and went back to the task at hand.

"How about you?" he asked me, "You play any elegant instruments, or do that thing where you sit in a window and do a sappy ballad about your dreams? Because I can train that out of you, as long as you've got the fundamentals."

"Oh, I'm not any good at stuff like that," I assured him.

My singing voice is sarcastic. If another princess sings a song, I can copy it with an acidic precision known generally as the 'villain's ironic reprise'. I would never trust myself to try and sing something in earnest.

"Well, if you change your mind, we can always put you on the triangle," he said, in the same breezy sort of way his sister talked.

"Are you and Naomi twins or…?" I asked.

"Yes! Natural fraternal twins! Very rare," he said proudly. "She got all of Mama and Daddy's best qualities, and I got all their bad habits. Mostly Daddy's bad habits, if I'm being honest. I'm hardly a workaholic…"

I asked him some questions about Queen Tiana because it seemed like a natural way to keep the conversation going. The more I learned about her, the more impressed I was. I found myself lamenting that I wasn't in her charity club instead of Queen Belle's. But then I remembered the instant access to the castle, and reminded myself not to take my good fortune for granted.

It turned out that if he wasn't trying to get you to fall madly in love with him, Nathaniel wasn't as insufferable as he first appeared. I decided I wouldn't mind at all if he was dating one of my friends.

"Can I give you some advice about Ingrid?" I said to him quietly, doing my utmost to sound like her loyal sidekick. "Don't push too hard. I think she'll really like you if you give her the chance."

He smiled at me, looking bewildered but grateful.

I was about to put the next book in the shelf, when I realized the rest of the stack was gone. I counted how many were on the shelf, reciting the fake titles and their coordinating real titles in my mind. Frantically, I began to worry that someone had taken several titles, and my secret collection was about to be revealed by the type of girl who actually _wanted_ to read something called _Tealeaves_ (about three hip young matchmakers in Mulan's kingdom, so good at finding matches for others, but would they ever find happiness for themselves?).

It was with enormous relief that I discovered all of the missing books in a big pile next to Cadfael.

"I'm borrowing these," he announced, still not looking up from the first one he'd taken.

"Hey," Nathaniel said, punching me in the shoulder like a big brother. "Thanks for the advice."

I nodded at him, but I didn't tell him I was thinking about something my father used to say before his mysterious disappearance:

"Be kind to people who don't matter to your plans. One day, they might."


	8. Perfect Isn't Easy

For a while, we all managed to live without incident. I was proud of this minor accomplishment, because our first forty-eight hours at Auradon had been so… eventful. We went to our classes, we stayed out of trouble, nobody ate anything weird, and things were generally fine.

And then it was Club Day. The second Friday of the new academic year, during which every club and extra-curricular at the school made booths to promote themselves. I had enquired with Fairy Godmother whether being part of Queen Belle's book club filled my requirement, but she said she felt in my case – meaning the case of perpetually-startled easily-poisoned sidekick-Greta – it would be a good idea to participate in more group activities with AKs. I also got the distinct impression that Belle had chatted with her about encouraging some separation from Armand.

So, rather unjustly, I had to participate in _two_ extra-curriculars.

Booths were set up in the courtyard, the garden, and inside the auditorium. I made an early decision that Ingrid was in charge of seeing which clubs had garden booths, and reporting back to me if anything looked interesting.

Apparently, nothing in there was interesting.

It was going to be another slog of a day.

Tourney tryouts were to be at two o'clock in the afternoon, once the majority of signing up and booth browsing had taken place. Armand's attendance was mandatory, and he asked if I'd make sure I was there to "cheer him on", something I took to mean ensuring he wasn't tricked into signing any paperwork.

Ingrid and I ambled around the booths in the courtyard, looking at the Science Club's very impressive display for a few minutes, then loitering around the Baking Club's booth to try their complimentary spinach puffs.

The first person to run into us was Cadfael.

"I've signed up for the Fairies and Friends Club," he informed us, with a very slight smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "I thought it was an amusing choice, given my familial legacy and the fact that I'm gay."

I was so pleased with his word play, I almost shook his hand, but in the end decided just to say:

"Good choice, I hope you enjoy it."

"Apparently, most members also serve on various decorating committees," he replied, "so if they allow you onto the Princess Council, we can collaborate on ways to offend people."

The Princess Council, I had decided, would be too much too soon. On top of which, I'd begun to suspect that very few students felt royal citizens of the Isle _counted_ as royal citizens. No one had said it to my face, but whenever someone mentioned my title, I got an awful lot of snobby side-eye.

The three of us made our way along various displays that weren't of much interest, until we came to the Khuno Appreciation Society booth. I was deeply amused to discover it was a real, accredited club. For some naïve reason, I thought he'd been kidding.

"Hello Blonde One, Creepy Guy," he nodded at Ingrid and Cadfael, then smiled at me, "Deathtrap."

I gasped in hurt surprise, even though I was well aware he'd been calling me that.

"That's not a very nice nickname," I pouted, trying to look cute or coquettish or some mix of the two.

"Not my fault," Khuno explained. "You've got a giant neon sign saying any guy who goes near you is a crime scene waiting to happen. Otherwise you could've been Future Mrs. Khuno."

"You know Armand and I aren't actually dating, right?" I asked innocently.

"Yeah, it's kind of like, a whale isn't _technically_ a fish, but it still swims around and lives in the sea and does pretty much everything a fish does, so…" he shook his head. "I'm just going to have to live with being the one that got away. I'm very sorry for your loss."

I was sorry for my loss, too. I'd researched his kingdom during a study period. It was literally dripping with riches.

Ingrid picked up his clipboard and started to read it, looking progressively more and more outraged.

"What the hell is wrong with people?" she demanded. "He has fourteen members!"

"What can I say?" Khuno shrugged, "I'm awesome and everybody loves me."

"Do they offer you sacrifices?" Cadfael wondered, reading the list of names over Ingrid's shoulder.

"Uh…" Khuno was understandably weirded out by the question. "They bring me fizzy sodas and crunchy snacks?"

Cadfael nodded like this was a satisfactory answer, then wordlessly wandered off to inspect a booth for the Astronomy Club.

"What, exactly, is that guy's deal?" Khuno asked, watching him go.

"He's the son of the Horned King," I reminded him.

"Okay, yeah. But… I don't know who that is, so…"

"Uh-oh," Ingrid laughed sardonically. "You'd better look that shit up."

We left him looking remarkably insecure for a guy with his own administration-approved fan club, and continued our search for mandatory hobbies. A few things genuinely piqued my interest – a correspondence club, a debate team, horseback riding – but nothing suitable for my growing reputation as a hopeless but well-meaning second-stringer. I was looking for something along the lines of glass blowing or portrait restoration. Something where I could literally destroy things in front of everyone like a tear-stained tornado of good intentions and honest tries.

In the auditorium, we found the Jazz Club playing one of their customary impromptu concerts. It quickly devolved into Nathaniel serenading Ingrid with a trumpet version of _So This is Love_. Everyone was staring at her.

She was not pleased.

It was probably best to leave before the violence broke out. I knocked over a display by the drama club and killed the mood, and after a few apologies and attempts to help that made everything worse, we managed to slip back into the courtyard.

"This place is so annoying!" Ingrid stomped one foot, with bizarrely expert stomping precision, let out a huff, and rolled her eyes at the universe. "These clubs are lame, and everywhere I go Prince Trumpet of the Land of Desperation is waiting to pounce."

"I think the clubs are _sort of_ okay…"

I was only sticking up for them because people could overhear us. They were terrible and I loathed the idea of joining one.

"There they are!" A familiar voice said from behind us, and I turned to see Jane heading our way, with Fletcher White in tow, and two people I was most certainly _not_ expecting to have to talk to that day.

I elbowed Ingrid to get herself together and take a look.

"Carlos?" I said, very cheerfully, "Evie?"

It was impossible to grow up on the Isle of the Lost and not have at least seen Mal's infamous gang of miscreants, even if you'd had very little conversation with them.

"Hello!" Evie said, every bit the gracious queen who'd put her troubled past behind her. I noticed the way she tried to smile to obscure a certain softening of her eyes, betraying a heart-bursting sympathy for mankind. I decided I was going to have to start practicing that in the mirror.

"Carlos came by to help me with setup today," Jane explained, looping her fingers through his as she spoke. He looked happily down at their hands, like he couldn't believe how lucky he was.

"So sweet!" I cooed in the way I'd learned Auradon girls do. You can either put one hand flat across your heart or tilt your head to one side while you do it. If you do both, it looks disingenuous. (I usually use the hand manoeuver, because my father once told me when I tilt my head I look like a hawk watching a mouse.)

"And I'm here to support Dizzy's Fashion Club," Evie explained proudly. "Did you guys sign up? I'm sure it would be a nice break from how crazy it can get around here. And what's more fun that sitting around with another VK making custom accessories?"

 _Good god, the custom accessories_.

Dizzy was remarkably committed to her craft, but she had a… singular vision. The fact that Ingrid purposefully chose a utilitarian, military influenced style seemed to do the girl's head in. As for me, I wore whatever she gave me because it usually didn't go with any of my clothes and made me look like I was trying too hard.

"Her sheet was totally full when we got there," I explained. "She's such a hit around here! Everyone loves her!"

"And she can't shut up about you," Ingird told Evie. "Holy shit, it's like she's writing a book about your life. Evie did this, Evie says that, you guys are so different from Evie, Evie is the greatest."

Evie laughed uncomfortably.

"She's like a little sister to me," she explained.

We all nodded understandingly.

Carlos seemed to pick up on the big awkward black hole Ingrid had shot through the conversation, and decided to fill it:

"So! You guys settling in okay? Getting used to all the smiling and the food?"

I decided to cringe. Jane still felt enormously guilty about the unicorn punch incident, and every now and then I ever-so-softly poked that bruise, just to keep it fresh.

"The smiling is great," I confessed, "the food… has been a little trickier for me."

Jane took a deep breath and plastered on a big smile.

"Yeah…" she said, clearly not wanting me to tell any version of that story, "but it's getting better! Have you two picked your clubs?"

"All the good ones are full," I said glumly.

"Nothing suits me," Ingrid sighed in annoyance.

"What about yoga?" Jane suggested.

"Full," I reported with a frown.

Fletcher, who had so far been hanging a little back from the others, shrugged at us and said:

"Worst comes to worst, just make your own club. As long as the council okays it and you have a supervising teacher, you can do whatever you want."

Evie nodded enthusiastically at his suggestion.

"That's true!" She said, "We didn't have to do an extra-curricular while I was here, but if I was in your shoes… boots… I would've started my own club like Dizzy's! What are you into?"

 _Don't say money and guns_ , I thought frantically in Ingrid's direction, _don't say money and guns_.

"I guess I don't really know," Ingrid confessed, to my enormous relief. "I don't really have hobbies."

Of course she did. Apart from the aforementioned money and guns, she loved exercise and athletics. Military history was our favourite topic of conversation when we were both very sleepy, and she was quite fond of bath bombs and fragrances. The last one she was less likely to admit to.

The trouble was the lack of clubs that matched those interests. Even the yoga club was more concerned with mental wellness than actual fitness. And Future Guard Captains of Auradon, which had looked promising, point-blank refused to let either one of us join. Something about not wanting us to have swords.

"Well, you've got until the end of next week, so don't—" Jane was about to reassure us not to stress out too much, when a frantic looking girl with ringlets ran up and started telling her that someone had punched the president of the Jazz Club.

(Later we learned Nathaniel was decked by the president of the Acapella Club, who was sick of having her group's music drowned out by a perpetual Mardi Gras. Ingrid was _thrilled_ to learn it was a girl who hit him. One of the Triton granddaughters, it turned out. Never interrupt a mermaid's solo.)

Jane made her apologies and exit, Carlos hurrying after her in case she needed back-up. Fletcher took this as a cue to wander away and do whatever Fletcher did with his spare time, leaving us with a very sympathetic-seeming Evie.

"I just wanted to say," she told us, eyes shimmering like opals, "I know the beginning is really hard. _Really_ hard. But you'll survive. The important thing to remember is this isn't about getting rid of your life as a VK, it's about finding out who you are beyond that. It's your chance to be something better than your parents."

She was very sincere.

I think I might've flinched, because she shifted her gaze from the two of us to just me.

"If you need anything, even if it's just somebody who's been through the same stuff, I'm only a phone call away."

Of all the people I'd so far encountered in Auradon, all the princes and princesses and would-be royals, Evie was the only one who could probably win the hearts of a conflicted nation. I was enormously relieved she'd left politics behind in favour of entrepreneurship.

And while I'm sure her speech had been meant to comfort us, it instead left us both feeling more out-of-place and uncomfortable than ever. We thanked her for her concern and disentangled ourselves from her presence.

"I've figured something out," Ingrid decided, as we headed over to the tourney field to watch the tryouts. "I kept wondering why everyone says we're so different from the last group of VKs. It's because _they_ hated they Isle of the Lost and didn't want to turn out like their parents. But _we_ all hate the Isle of the Lost and admire our parents. Huge difference."

"What about Mal?" I asked, not arguing, just wondering how she fit in the theory. "She was obsessed with pleasing Maleficent. She was killing herself to follow in her mother's footsteps. Do you remember that summer she wore the dragon horn headband?"

"Oh my god, and she was just _everywhere_ with that thing on!" Ingrid said, in that excited tone of voice that only happens when you realize someone had the same weird cultural touchstones as you.

"And then it was like everyone had to have a headband with their villain heritage on it," I nodded enthusiastically. "Maisie Medusa had the two crocodiles…"

"Didn't Harry rip that off her head with his stupid hook? I heard he took out a huge clump of her hair!"

"I heard that, too! I have no idea if it was true, she used to throw those huge tantrums and nobody would see her for weeks on end, so maybe he did..."

"And Uma, with the octopus one!" Ingrid remembered.

"That's why everyone stopped wearing them," I gossiped as proudly as Junebug would've. "Mal told Uma it looked like she had a calamari salad on her head, and Uma got so embarrassed she said anyone wearing one of those headbands would get thrown into the harbour from that day forward."

"Is that true?"

"Completely. One of Armand's brothers is in Uma's crew. He gave us an eye-witness account."

Ingrid stopped dead in her tracks and looked at me, mouth agape.

"Shut. Up."

"Gil," I said, as if to verify. "He's the rebellious one."

We kept walking.

"I never liked those stupid headbands anyway," she confessed. "Maybe it was because I couldn't figure out what to put on mine. Maybe… a hot air balloon full of remorse?"

"Oh, I had the same problem. I briefly considered cutting out a silhouette of a man proposing to an easily deceived woman, but I had a hard time finding construction paper," I joked.

It was nice to be myself for a little while with somebody who hated the same things I did.

When we got to the tourney field, the bleachers were full of adoring girls watching the guys on the field warm up. I immediately regretted my thin shreds of loyalty to Armand. We were going to have to join that gaggle and blend in.

"But will she be able to pull off _sports girlfriend_?" Ingrid wondered cynically, referring to the deep breath I often took to brace myself before trying a new social situation.

"Not helpful," I warned her in my generous-and-sweet tone of voice.

"Do you ever go 'woo' instead of applauding like you're at the opera?" She asked sincerely, "Because I think that's going to be mandatory."

I do not go 'woo', as it happens. Even if it's mandatory. I was prepared to loudly call for Armand to 'get it' if he was near some kind of spherical points-gaining object, though.

Honestly, it wouldn't be my first time cheering him on at this sort of thing. I'd been to two Gaston-a-Thons, the semi-annual family games where all five brothers were pitted against one another in a variety of _ridiculous_ tasks. (My favourite was The Antler Decoration Challenge. It was always a toss-up.) But, back home, the crowd was always free to applaud as it liked, and encouraged to gamble. This was going to be different.

And it was going to be different for Armand, too. Everything he enjoyed about the Gaston-a-Thons – family bonding, the easy-going atmosphere, the barbequed boar at the end – was missing, while everything he hated – angry shouting, demands for higher performance levels, competitive point keeping, sweaty guys trying to tackle him – was there in full force.

I couldn't see Armand anywhere on the field yet, but Ingrid spotted Junebug and Naomi among the crowd of spectators.

"There's your camouflage," she nodded at them, as Junebug noticed us and waved us.

Thankfully, they'd chosen seats on the edge of the bleachers, so there wasn't a lot of fuss in going to join them. I wasn't really in the mood for botching a row cross, the most convincing way to do it is to apologize the whole time, then get something sticky spilled on you. It's a very effective manoeuver, but you also have to spend the rest of the event sitting in whatever you end up covered in.

"Nothin' like a fine fall afternoon watching a bunch of guys in tight clothes run around in lil' circles," Junebug said dreamily, offering me her bag of jellybeans.

"No thanks," I said, sitting down beside her.

"Oh shoot, I forgot," she shook her head. "It is a clean wonder you're not dead. I mean, this school might as well be _made_ of sugar."

Ingrid sat on the other side of the pair, next to Naomi.

"Somebody punched your brother in the face," she reported.

"…Was the somebody you?" Naomi ventured carefully.

"Not yet."

It turned out that Naomi was no big fan of tourney, but she was there to promote school spirit, and because Suzanne Darling (who we were told was somewhere in the crowd behind us "bein' her awful self") used her association with the athletics department as some kind of leverage in the ongoing feud. Suzanne, as it happened, was the younger sister of a former player Coach Jenkins had been particularly reliant on. Suzanne used this to rule all council discussions of pep rallies and athletic events with an iron fist.

"I just don't think a school's identity should revolve around its athletics department," Naomi said quietly. "But it does, so if I want to get anything good done for the arts department, or even the main academic programs, I have to wade through a moat full of pom-poms."

"Politics is the ultimate contact sport," Ingrid said coolly. "Wouldn't you say so, Greta?"

"I think it all sounds _intense_ ," I nodded, looking like I couldn't be paid to dive into that mess.

But, oh-ho, what I wouldn't have given to breeze into a council meeting and rip out Suzanne Darling's administrative throat just for the fun of it. Unfortunately, I had important long-term goals, and little time for fun.

Junebug succinctly explained how the various elements of tourney worked and were combined. She was, as usual, very informative but prone to tangents. The gist is a variety of sports are combined to create a series of events based on obstacles a hero in the field of battle might face.

Ingrid listened with rapt attention, before standing up and announcing:

"I'm going to try out." she seemed enthusiastic. More enthusiastic than she'd been about any of her other options, and I wasn't too surprised. The whole thing sounded like track and field merged with hypothetical crisis roleplay. That was perfect for her.

Naomi and Junebug exchanged concerned glances.

"Uh, well, you kind of… _can't_ …" Junebug said carefully.

"Why the hell not?" Ingrid asked, not sounding particularly irritated, just a little confused. "Armand is trying out, so VKs are good to go."

"It's not a VK thing," Naomi explained, glancing around like she was afraid of being overheard. "It's a no-girls-allowed thing."

Ingrid's expression morphed into one I had so far never seen her wear. Her eyes narrowed, her cheekbones seemed sharper, and her mouth tightened into a cynical half-smile. I hoped I never looked half as dangerous as she did in that moment, because it was very memorable.

"How strange," I said carefully, making sure to keep my sidekick tones floating nicely above my cautionary ones. "Back on the Isle, we had mixed teams all the time…"

"Tourney is training for _princes_ and _heroes_ ," Junebug said, clearly disapproving, "it's like how the boys can take the Chivalry course and we can't. Tourney isn't part of our program…"

"Leaving aside that Lonnie was the best thing to ever happen to the Knights," Naomi grumbled. "She only got to play because Jay exploited a loophole. And if it wasn't for that damn Suzanne Darling – I'm so sorry, I didn't mean to swear!"

Naomi looked horrified with herself, while Ingrid looked uncertain if anyone _had_ sworn.

"Loophole?" I asked, "If there's a loophole, it might be the perfect size to sneak Ingrid through."

We were given the truncated version of Lonnie's road to captaining the Knights, and how despite excellent performance on the field, the PTA received near-constant pressure to disallow her from playing. It was one of Naomi's big crusades to have the tourney rulebook amended, but she couldn't get enough support.

"So, you're telling me that a stupid tradition nobody likes is more important than _winning_?" Ingrid looked disgusted. "Winning is everything. This is insane."

"We even tried to get a girls team organized," Junebug added glumly, "but Coach Jenkins said it wouldn't work because there wouldn't be any other girls teams at the other schools to play against 'em."

"To which I replied that the Neverland team will play against _anyone_ …" Naomi sighed, still boiling a bit from the old argument. "He doesn't like the idea of a mixed team, either. Apparently, girls are 'meek' and 'not cut out for the rough stuff' and he worries female players will call time outs anytime playing messes up their pretty hair."

Ingrid, now furious, bit her lip and stared hatefully in the direction of Coach Jenkins. He was talking with the fashionable fathers of potential players, all there to see how the team would shape up that year. I didn't recognize any of them as important figures.

Before I realized it, she was up and off the bleachers, heading towards the coach like an arrow heading towards an open eye. I watched her, not even considering going after her, because something of a brilliant idea was beginning to form.

Ideas are like children, if you neglect them when they're young it's much harder to get them to turn out the way you want. And I had a feeling that this was an important one.

From where we sat, we couldn't hear Ingrid, we could just see her yelling in outrage at Coach Jenkins. Naomi and Junebug debated going over to stop her, but they decided it was probably safer to stay where they were after she started kicking over big blue barrels of sports drink.

I was so wrapped up in my machinations, I almost didn't notice when Armand came to stand at my elbow.

"Ingrid seems… unhappy..." he noted, watching the pantomime unfold.

"Girls aren't allowed to join the team," I told him absently, fumbling for the last thread of my new plan.

He watched me think, which sounds weird, but he does it all the time, so I'm used to it. He claims it's when I'm at my prettiest, although I have sincere doubts he's telling the truth.

I wove together the plan like a tapestry, like I was looking at the rest of the world through a window while I worked.

It sounded far away and almost like a dream when Fairy Godmother walked up to Armand and said:

"All set for tryouts?"

She clearly hadn't looked across the field to our left yet.

"I guess so, but I joined a group called the Huntsmen this morning," he told her happily. "They don't actually hunt things, but there's a lot of woodcraft and things I like, so I'm looking forward to it."

"Well, that's wonderful!" Fairy Godmother sounded truly pleased. "I guess Coach Jenkins is going to be disappointed…"

"I think he's got bigger problems," Armand told her, nodding in the direction of Ingrid, who was now tearing up a bunch of papers she'd snatched off of the coach's clipboard, while the team's supportive fathers scolded her in outrage.

"Oh!" Fairy Godmother gasped, "Oh no! No, no!"

She sounded like a woman running after a puppy that got off its leash as she hurried over to the little hurricane.

Finally, I was happy with the new plan. It had come together very quickly, and it might have to change as things went, but it looked good. Very tidy.

"If someone wanted to start their own club, all they need is council permission and a supervising teacher, correct?" I asked Naomi, carefully putting the plan in a mental box and storing it with the others.

"That's right," Naomi answered, looking at me inquisitively.

"How does one obtain council permission?" I asked.

"For a club? It's not really formal, all you need is am accreditation. We pretty much give 'em out like candy, because you also need a minimum member count and a supervising teacher for the club to run. It's an easy way for us to get good will, because the really bad ideas can't get either."

"Could _you_ give out an accreditation?" I was having a hard time bouncing back into sidekick mode, but I forced myself to wrinkle my brow and look like I was concentrating in the moment.

"Yes…" Naomi answered, looking terribly suspicious.

"So, if, let's say, I wanted to start a health and fitness club for girls – emphasizing things like salads and morning workout routines and which kinds of juices made your skin glow – and called it, oh, Auradon Valkyries or something along those lines, could you give me the paperwork I need?"

Naomi and Junebug looked at me in comprehending surprise, then look at each other conspiratorially.

"I could arrange that," Naomi said. "I could also put you and Ingrid in touch with girls who might be interested in a… health and fitness club. The trouble is getting a supervising teacher."

"I've got a few hunches about that part," I told them. "Be we'll need that accreditation. And a better name than the Valkyries."

They immediately set to brainstorming, while I excused myself and got Armand to help me down off the bleachers.

"We have places to go," I told him with a very happy smile.

"I'm supposed to do the tryouts…" He reminded me, one eye still on the chaos Ingrid was causing.

Fairy Godmother was clearly trying to calm her down, but she'd found a stack of plastic pylons and was pulling them off one by one and throwing them onto the field with an eerie calmness.

"You've signed up for something else," I reminded him with a dismissive wave of my hand. "Making you audition for a team you have absolutely no intention of joining would be the height of farce. It's only an excuse to show you off to people who make donations to the school, and Coach Jenkins is hoping to get a few of them to talk you into signing on. Ingrid's already spoiled all of that."

"But, what about Fairy Godmother?"

"You told her you've joined the Huntsmen," I reminded him, already starting to walk towards my next goal. "If she's a problem, I'll handle it."

I didn't have any more time to waste on the Knights. I was busy following a piece of advice my father gave me before his mysterious disappearance:

"There are two ways to get an army. You can steal one, or you can build one."


	9. The Burned-Out Village

The Auradon Museum of Cultural History was in a modern complex of buildings within walking distance of the school. The summer exhibit had been something called _Animals to the Rescue_ , highlighting the history of – one would assume – Auradon's most beloved heroic animals. Like the dragon that kept telling Mulan to give up, or the horse that almost killed King Eugene of Corona. The banners for it were coming down, and being replaced with bright turquoise advertisements for _Secrets of Maru_ , set to run through the fall and winter.

One-sided propaganda factories are like car crashes, and I'm as susceptible to morbid fascination as the next person, but it wasn't our destination.

The building next to the museum was the Royal Library.

Mirrored glass and steel, it was very new and shiny, full of promise, but unwelcoming. Something about the hyper-reflectivity, the coldness of the blue autumn sky shimmering back at us, the thick girders and the large double doors with handles that looked like highly-polished prison bars.

But even the ominously clean architecture couldn't deter me, and I can't say I wasn't at least a little excited to see inside.

Despite the fact that villains, as a group, tend to be much better-read than their heroic counterparts, there wasn't a great big building devoted to books on the Isle of the Lost. Books were circulated through stores, bartered for high-quality goods with neighbours, or hoarded in dark basements next to skulls that served as candle holders. Knowledge was currency. Arcane knowledge, political knowledge, secrets, rumours, it was all worth something to somebody.

Beside me, Armand let out a low whistle.

"That's a lot of books," he said. "It's like a graveyard for stories."

"A cemetery of bad ideas and public records," I nodded, as we headed through a garden of low hedges and rose bushes. All of which were blessedly inanimate.

"Please tell me we're looking for something easy to find…" Armand open the library door for me like a gentleman.

"We're looking for law books," I whispered. "Oh! But see if you can find a copy of Hathi's _When Fear Came_ for me if you get bored and want to wander. I hear it's very worthwhile."

"…are you asking me to look for a book written by an elephant?" he whispered back, raising his eyebrows and crossing his arms.

"Don't look at me like I'm being weird, that elephant has extensive military experience."

Armand continued looking at me like I was being weird.

"We just passed a museum with a banner celebrating a dog who foiled a crime ring," I reminded him. "This is the world we live in."

He was about to make some sort of disparaging remark about how jungle animals shouldn't be writing better books than people – an opinion that should be directed at people who write books, not people who read books by jungle animals – when a polite cough came in our direction. It was impossible to see the cougher.

The front entrance of the library was a sort of cordoned off welcome zone, you walked in and were immediately presented with a huge shiny blue wall with a quote in yellow vinyl letters. "A library can make the smallest corner of the world feel big. Bon Voyage!" It was… _cheerful_. In front of it sat a selection of oversized ottomans made from huge gauges of knitted wool, just in case someone wanted to sit in the busiest, noisiest, dirtiest part of the building to read. They were the same yellow as the words.

You had to walk around the wall to get to see anything of the library itself, which smelled less like old books and fresh ink, and more like coffee and pumpkin cake.

We turned the corner, and the reason for this was immediately apparent. There was a coffee shop. Right there. It had bistro tables and highly polished wooden floors, and a woman in a blue and yellow apron with a golden rose motif on it looked at us expectantly. Other than her, there wasn't a soul in sight.

"Can I help you?" She asked.

 _Where the hell are the books?!_ I wanted to yell, but I just smiled and said:

"Something smells yummy, is that pumpkin?"

Armand had already made his way to a glass case of delicacies, some savoury, some sweet, none of them looking as toxically technicolour as the tea party offerings in regular rotation at the school.

"Babe, I want this cheese thing, but I don't have any money," he declared shamelessly.

I giggled because I wasn't at all sure about the woman in the apron, before heading to his side to look at the cheese thing in question. It really did look appetizing, and it wasn't just a bunch of eggs or some meat, a refreshing change for him. Normally, I would've supported this culinary adventurousness, but I didn't have any money either.

"Aren't you two students at Auradon Prep?" The woman asked. She sounded perpetually annoyed. Always an asset for customer service. "Don't you have a free service card?"

"Oh, they didn't give us those yet," Armand told her, blurting information like he'd been injected with truth serum. "We're VKs, so we have to earn them through being trustworthy."

The woman recoiled from us in rigid disgust. It was unsettling. Since arriving, we'd been greeted with guarded suspicion and cloying sympathy from a group of people who had mentally prepared themselves to deal with VKs every day. But this was a barometer of what was going on in the minds of the average Auradonian citizen. And it looked like despite Future Queen Mal's whirlwind tour of the world, the average Auradonian citizen did _not_ like the idea of us.

It felt horrible.

It was like being kicked in the abdomen during someone else's beautiful wedding.

In that moment, watching this stranger eye us up and down like a couple of plague-carrying serial killers, I vowed to get Armand his stupid cheese thing that was probably stale no matter what. He would have that pastry in his hands, even if I had to kill this woman and make it look like a tragic electrocution from an open wire on the cash register.

"He's kidding," I laughed adoringly, and wrapped my arm through Armand's as a quick visual distraction. "We're transfer students from Arendelle, they're just working out all of our IDs and stuff. It's a long process. I don't suppose we could get something with a receipt? And then next time we're here, with our cards, it can just be logged onto our accounts?"

She looked suspicious. Of course she did, it was total bullshit, it wasn't important if she believed that part.

"I'm not sure about that…" she said carefully.

"Oh, well, the last thing I want to do is get you into trouble," I told her as earnestly as I could manage, before turning to Armand. "Honey, I left my purse in the basket on the scooter. I'll just go get it. Pick out the rest of your order, and I'll pay cash for both of us."

'Honey' is code for 'I'm about to do something highly illegal, distract this person.'

"Sure, you want a hot drink or a cold drink?" He said with admirable casualness, knowing full well there was no purse and no scooter.

"Surprise me."

I left him perusing the menu while the woman in the apron watched him like he was planning a jailbreak.

The self-fulfilling prophecy is an interesting concept to me. Let's use a totally random example and not an ethical quandary I've been obsessed with my whole life, just something totally out of the air. A king traps all of the "villainous" people in one place, along with their friends, family, and professional colleagues. Everyone on Team Bad News is there, including any children these villains might have. So he's created an environment where all of the influences in the lives of these children are (his idea of) villainous. Has he himself _ensured_ an entirely new generation of embittered villains? Or is he _protecting_ the new generation of princes and princesses from a group of their peers somehow genetically inclined towards destroying them?

This is the sort of thing that goes through my head when I'm doing something like walking around the outside of a royal library, looking for the employee entrance and making sure there aren't any CCTV cameras watching me.

Do I do things like this because people say: "Daughter of Hans, you are no good," and I let them be right? Or do I do things like this because I really want to? It must be the first one, but I can't be at all sure, because if I _want_ to do bad things to people who assume I'm only capable of bad things, isn't it the second one after all?

A small door was hidden next to two dumpsters and a private parking lot. It was painted grey to better blend with the glass box look of the building. Security measures were none existent – who would rob _a library_ in Belle's kingdom, that's _crazy_ – and I broke the pushpin style lock without braking a sweat.

The back entrance was as mercifully devoid of people as the front. There was a utilitarian little corridor with concrete floors that led to bathrooms on one side and an employee area on the other. I slipped into the employee area and found a row of lockers. Only one of them was closed, meaning the barista was the only employee in that part of the building, likely because people didn't actually visit the library. (I wasn't too surprised, it was, in fact, a coffee shop.)

The locker had a combination lock, which I generally don't like because they take time and patience. Luckily, it was a cheap combination lock, so I used a quick trick that popped it open like a jack-in-the-box.

I didn't know anything about the woman at the counter except that she was bigoted, but her locker contents did not surprise me. Two photographs of her on vacation with a group of sour-faced friends, a forest of half-used lipglosses in near-identical shades, a copy of _Tiara Wars_ , and a worn down canvas and leather tote bag with a rhinestone fleur-de-lis on the side.

As I grabbed a tissue from a box on a nearby table and used it to hold the handles of the bag, I wondered if the fleur-de-lis meant she was from Beast's original kingdom, a pre-Auradonian family. Perhaps a mother or grandmother had been riled up, torch and pitchfork in hand, and followed Gaston all the way to the castle. None of those people, the mob members, had been condemned to the Isle of the Lost. Despite all the horrible things they were willing to do. Maybe that was why she disliked VKs so viscerally. She had to view us as _distinct_ , descended of people who were _different_ from the Kill the Beast crowd, _genetically inclined_ to villainy. Otherwise, she wouldn't be any different from what we were.

Or maybe she had the bag because it was tacky and she was tacky.

Either way, I felt no pangs of remorse when I removed twenty-five dollars from a wallet inside the bag, carefully closed everything up, put it back exactly the way I'd found it, and left.

"Sorry I took so long," I said breezily, walking back into the little coffee shop area, "I ran into Suzanne, and she had a bit of a _girl crisis_."

I pulled a conspiratorial face at the woman in the apron, as if to silently say _my purse isn't with me, it is full of tampons and with a desperate friend, but I brought cash_.

"They've got pumpernickel… biscuit… things!" Armand said excitedly, "You love pumpernickel!"

I noticed that coffees weren't assembled, nor baked goods placed into little wax paper envelopes so we could carry them around. She was waiting to see the cash.

"Did you choose drinks?" I asked, very visibly pulling the money from my pocket.

"There's a sugar-free, honey sweetened espresso thing with almond milk," he reported, "and I'm trying a pumpkin spicy something-or-other. It's the best, she says."

The whole thing, including cheese pastry and pumpernickel biscuit thing, came to around twelve dollars. I put the rest of the money in the tip jar, and said:

"Thanks for the treat!"

The woman in the apron didn't even look suspicious, just glad to be rid of us as we wandered further into the library. The fact that she didn't even attempt better customer service after getting a tip equal to the amount spent did a lot to ease my conscience. Not that it was particularly troubled on that one.

"Greta," Armand whispered, "where did you get that money?"

I stopped and looked up into his eyes, and waited. We'd moved into an area with shiny, vaguely glass, vaguely plastic looking tables with laptops on them and charging stations. It was eerily empty.

"I shouldn't have asked," he said, very quickly. "How's your coffee? Mine's terrible. It tastes like somebody melted a plastic jack-o-lantern into a big pot of caramel and added coffee. To punish the coffee for something its father did. Like a big steaming cup of Auradon…"

"Don't complain about things you get for free," I scolded him softly.

The cheese pastry, he happily reported, was pretty good. My coffee was – surprise, surprise – overly sweetened with the honey, and the pumpernickel was dry, but it could've been considerably worse. It was leaps and bounds better than the school provided food, although nowhere near as good as Naomi's rebel kitchen.

"I feel like we're not seeing any books …" Armand said, no longer feeling any compunction to whisper, since we were obviously alone in the building apart from the sole barista. "I feel like that's weird…"

The tech area split off into two distinct zones. One was a children's story time nook decorated with an eye-rolling amount of lions and roses, and focused obviously on a currently empty wingback chair. No doubt this was where Queen Belle had her literacy promotion photo ops, surrounded by eager little listeners all excited for story time.

On the Isle, we had something like that. A terrifying lion would stretch out in the cool shadows on top of the dockyard crates on very hot, sunny days. His glinting green eyes would fall on young faces, black claws idly tapping, and he'd tell darkly amusing fables to pass the time. Most of us loved it, even though our parents always warned us never get _too_ close.

In the opposite direction of Belle's storybook corner was a split-level staircase, leading to a second floor and a basement. Beside it was a refreshingly large collection of magazines.

"Oh, finally, _something_ ," I breathed in relief.

"You know, I'm surprised. Dad always told me Belle was nuts for books, like even more than you," Armand said, sticking his hands on his hips and cocking his head to one side. "He said she was so into reading, she used to walk around with a novel, crashing into stuff and ignoring townsfolk. 'Your little mademoiselle hasn't caused a traffic accident because she refused to look up!' And I told him that you care about traffic safety and prefer to read sitting down."

His Gaston impression was very accurate. I felt my cheeks start to go pink, and the tops of my ears go hot at the idea of them discussing me and comparing me to Belle. Armand, completely oblivious, chuckled fondly.

"Dad likes you," he said wistfully. "Almost as much as he likes Gerard's girlfriend!"

"What?!" My voice was slightly louder than I intended, "Sibyl?! Gaston likes Sybil Smee more than he likes me? That's ridiculous. I get him Father's Day presents! Nice ones!"

"Babe. Relax," Armand told me, looking very amused. "Dad has really, really, really old-fashioned ideas about how girlfriends are supposed to be. Sybil is obsessed with Gerard and she has zero brain cells and she can cook. She's his ideal daughter-in-law."

"No matter what I do, I never just _win_ ," I groaned. "Stay here and look for legal journals, I'm going to see what's upstairs."

"Ok, but while you're up there, maybe remind yourself that you aren't exactly Dad's biggest fan, and I would rather drink unicorn punch and die than date somebody like Sybil," he said as I started up the stairs. "Sometimes winning is losing in disguise."

I stopped and leaned over the railing to look at him. His face was below mine, which was a rare and unusual angle for me to look at it from. He had very friendly, round cheekbones that gave him a kind of perpetual softness. It was difficult to notice it when all you saw was jaw and smirk. My loose hair fell like a curtain that hid us from the walls of the library.

I didn't know what I wanted to say to him.

I handed him the uneaten half of my pumpernickel biscuit, smiled, and went up the stairs.

"This is so dry!" His voice called after me, mouth full of bread. "Yuck. Yeah. Bleh, the coffee is still terrible. I don't even know if washing it down helped or made it worse…"

The second floor was much more in line with how you might picture Queen Belle's Royal Library. The afternoon light flooded in from the all-glass walls, landing upon rows and rows of bright white bookcases, and a far wall echoed the one at the entrance. The same shiny blue, the same yellow letters, only this time they read: "I Want Adventure in the Great Wide Somewhere."

All of the books were novels by the look of it.

There was also an obvious check-out station, with one of the almost-glass, almost-plastic looking countertops in yellow, and sleek pearl white computers in a row to handle high-volume days. Given that we'd been in there for quite some time and hadn't had the slightest hint of other patrons, I doubted high-volume days existed.

I was surprised when a little old man shuffled out from a back office. He was surprised, too, by the looks of it. A well-loved teacup in his hand, steaming fresh with the tab of a teabag hanging over the side, he blinked at me like I was a mirage. His glasses were thick enough to magnify his eyes and all the tiny wrinkles around them, and tufts of white hair stuck out from behind his ears.

"We don't have an event today," he said absent-mindedly, and I honestly couldn't tell if he was telling me or asking himself.

"I'm looking for law books," I told him. "Anything about current laws, and the legal aspect of the kingdom's founding. I'm specifically interested in gender bias as coded into laws. _No man may do X, No woman may participate in Y_ , that sort of thing. I'm also looking for transcripts of royal negotiations, would they be here, or some kind of archive in the palace…?"

He broke into a beaming smile, and laughed very powerfully for a man of his age.

"A scholar! How wonderful!"

"Oh, no," I said bashfully, "I'm really just running an errand for a friend."

" _You_ are a reader," he said forcefully, putting his tea on the check-out counter and pointing at me with an unsteady, bony finger. "I can always tell a reader. Nowadays, it's because they look a little annoyed with this place."

"It is a bit confusing that downstairs is so… focused on non-literary pursuits."

"Modernization," he sneered grumpily. "When the library was new, it was a wonderful institution. But people stopped coming, so they kept adding things to cater to students who didn't want to read, instead of changing the school to make them want to read. It must break Belle's heart. When she was your age, she would come into my shop every day for a book, and I didn't have a tenth as many as this place has now…"

"I'm sure she's gutted," I said, a little more sarcastically than I'd intended.

The old man looked me over, a twinkle in his eye.

I cleared my throat and smiled serenely.

"Is there a law section?" I asked.

"Basement. Go down the stairs you came up and down again. Of course, the old charters are in the reference room, you'll need to sign out a carrel and get a key if you want to look at those," he said, all business now. "Royal transcripts are in the castle, I think they scan them into the computers nowadays, I won't be able to tell you much about that. But! I bet I can guess what you read, young lady."

As a general rule, I don't like fortune tellers or personality quizzes. But I decided to humour the old man since he was being useful.

"Alright," I said.

"You read what you've been told to read. You enjoy it, and you get a lot out of it, but I don't think you really read for yourself," he said. "I'll make you a deal. I'll give you a key to the reference room and assign you a carrel for the rest of the year, I'll get your card set up right here and now, if you do one thing for me."

"And what would that be?"

"Read the book I'm going to give you," he smiled his beaming smile again. "Read it cover to cover all in one go, read it twice if you want to."

"That's it?" I asked, deeply suspicious.

"That's it," he nodded.

He ducked behind a computer, switched it on, asked me for my name, date of birth and dorm room number, then pulled a card off a stack held together with a rubber band kept in a drawer under the counter. He put a small key on top of it, and asked me to read the key's very tiny serial number to him. I did.

"All set. That's your card, that's your key, you've got carrel number four all to yourself until June of next year, and this…" he turned back into the office, and emerged a few minutes later with a leather-bound book in his hands. "This is your side of the bargain."

He passed it to me gently. It was heavy. Old. The covers were thick card bound in real leather, the spine had been repaired more than once. A few places spoke of gold-leaf lettering that had flaked off, but there wasn't any legible title left. I went to open it, to read the inside title page, but the old man stopped me.

"Ah!" He said, raising a finger, "Once you start it, you have to finish it all in one go."

I thanked him for his help, and the book just to be polite, before heading back down to the magazine section. I felt strange about the encounter, like it belonged to a different kind of life or a different kind of person than me. Maybe I'd accidentally bumped into a happy princess occurrence instead of an evil princess one.

It didn't feel like a profound crossroads, though. It just felt like an aberration. To use a library appropriate metaphor, a page from another book had been sewn into mine by accident.

"Hey," Armand said, when I found him next to a wall display of _Pixie Dust_ back issues. "No law magazines, but do we know what we're wearing to Fall Ball? Are we coordinating?"

"No and no."

"According to basically everything here, we needed to start figuring that out four months ago. Do you have a makeup look?" He asked, surprisingly alarmed at my disinterested attitude.

"Did these stupid fashion magazines brainwash you?" I asked, "I was gone for two seconds."

"They say it can ruin your whole life if you get it wrong!" He whispered urgently. "People's friendships are destroyed, love dies, and reputations are sunk. If my tie is wrong, it could end my chances of getting a high-paid job in a royal court."

"Armand, your father is Gaston. The entire political world is dominated by the man he literally stabbed in the back with a piece of architecture. Tie colours are going to be the least of your worries when it's job hunting time," I told him patiently. "Now come on, what we want is in the basement."

The basement turned out to be familiar for all the wrong reasons. The stone floor was ice cold, and the lack of windows made the electric lights look amber and dull compared to the sunshine that radiated through the rest of the building. The bookcases were not the modern, slick, cube-shaped ones from the fiction section, or the slim functional ones from the magazine section. They were old and wooden, and disorganized. Stacks sat on the floor, shelves looked half empty, books were shoved horizontally on top of vertical rows inside shelves. Every footstep echoed softly, like it was being suffocated by unseen shadows.

"Kind of like the book area at Dr. Facilier's shop," Armand said.

"Except it smells like shoe polish and there aren't any dehydrated human heads," I nodded.

"I miss the shrunken heads, they'd make it feel less creepy," he said. "Like there's somebody here if we have an emergency."

"See if you can find a carrel marked four," I told him. "It's mine for the rest of the year."

"What's a carrel?"

"Like a permanent private desk."

He started to laugh, and I looked at him wonderingly.

"No, but babe," he took a bracing breath. "Normal people do not walk into a royal library for the first time in their lives and get a permanent desk in the basement in under an hour."

I decided to regale him with a favourite admonition of my father's, something he would often say before his mysterious disappearance:

"Normal people don't get crowns."

 **A/N: I spent last week in and out of the hospital because of cluster migraines. (And we have a heatwave, so it was fun in the sun...) Hence the lack of updates, but I'm slowly getting back into my groove! A big thank you to everyone who is reading and enjoying, and a special thank you to everyone who took the time to review. Feedback is so useful, and I do my best to incorporate it into the story. I really want this to be something all Disney fans enjoy, so if you have any ideas or suggestions, I'd love to hear them!**


	10. Trust in Me

Laws are dry, daunting, and written in their own special language. They contract and expand to necessary interpretation, like a pair of breathing lungs for society. Old ones get forgotten, unenforced, and kept on the books for much longer than necessary. Meanings are changed, then changed again, then changed _again_ until the whole reason for the law is distorted.

Sifting through them is like panning for gold. The reward is obvious and the work is tedious.

Armand had taken up carrel number four while I toiled away in the stacks by laying things out on the floor, putting them into sensible groups, and narrowing down what might be useful. He was pouring over a selection of possibly-relevant books, looking for a specific set of words. Sometimes he spun his chair around and told hunting stories, sometimes he got up and paced, but he was mostly diligent and helpful.

I was in the reference room when I came across one of the charter books I was after. On that particular visit, we were there to help tie down the rigging for a short-term gain – so I was pleasantly surprised to find something that might help locate my father.

If I'd been more careless or tired, I might've missed it completely.

"Armand," I called over my shoulder in the direction of the carrels.

"Nobody fell asleep!" He gulped groggily.

"Tell me the story of the Isle of the Lost," I said, staring at a column of hand-written dates in the book.

"Okay…" he said, leaning in the doorframe, "Uh, so Beast and Belle decided to get married, because shacking up is frowned upon in royal circles, and for a wedding present, Beast united all the kingdoms and lands into Auradon. Then he got elected king—"

"Good old democratic absolute monarchism," I muttered.

Armand ignored the snide interruption and went on:

"And he banished all the people he didn't like to the Isle of the Lost, because he's a big obnoxious hypocrite who thinks he's so great but he's not."

I nodded and looked up from the book, smiling with excitement.

"What would you say if I told you the Isle of the Lost was founded _before_ Auradon was united? Not by long, only around a month." I felt a surge of something like lightning strike my heart, animating tiny dormant impulses to move and move quickly. I quieted it.

"I would say I think this is one of those times where I'm not keeping up, because I don't think that would be a big deal, but you're acting like it's a _very_ big deal…"

"It's _everything_ ," I told him. "Why are we here?"

"We're looking up gender discrimination laws so that you can gain the long-term loyalty of people who feel excluded from current societal norms," he recited dutifully.

"No, not the library," I corrected, taking the massive charter book to the carrel and copying out all the dates and information I'd need to follow up with at Belle's castle. "Here in Auradon."

"Searching for Hans, who might be dead."

" _Prince_ Hans, and stop saying that." I folded up the page I'd made and tucked it into my pocket before starting to tidy up the collection of books we'd deemed irrelevant to the day's search. "But, yes. The problem is that I have no idea what he was _doing_ in Auradon. He always explains things in bits and pieces, and keeps secrets for no reason, so I'm never totally confident I know what the long-term plan is—"

"That must be annoying, when a loved one does that," Armand grinned.

"It's a good habit," I replied defensively. "Openness makes a person vulnerable. Unfortunately, in order to track him down, I've had to try and figure out what he figured out, and what he was going to do about it. I think this might be it."

"You think he figured out that they got two months mixed up in a book?" He shook his head in bafflement. "Babe, I'm really sorry, I am not getting this. Is it like when somebody dies and their family swears that a potato that looks kind of like them _is_ them, and then they make a special little shelf for Papa Potato and everyone thinks they've gone crazy because they have?"

I rolled my eyes.

"What has been the biggest historical inconsistency about Auradon? What's the one thing everybody wonders about it?"

"How… they… get… all the colours to match?" He ventured admirably.

"How Beast got everyone _to agree to it_ ," I explained. "Imagine we're the king and queen of a kingdom with, oh, let's say thirty thousand kilometers, and a population of roughly two million. Small, but impactful. We're beloved by our subjects because, I don't know, you saved me from some kind of immortal wizard who lived on a haunted island. A sassy phoenix helped you, it was very heroic. Happily ever after, and so forth."

"Do we live in a castle?"

"Of course."

"How did I beat the wizard?" He asked, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

"It's not important," I said, then realized he wouldn't let me finish the parts that _were_ important unless I came up with something. "You found the… box he kept his heart in and lit it on fire. Okay? Okay. So, we have a booming lumber industry, lots of fish and game, but let's say our main export is medicine. Our kingdom makes the best medicine in all the lands, everyone knows you can't beat us in the healing game, they don't even try."

"We should keep our fish and game for our own people anyway. I'm a fish and game kind of king."

"Right, this is all pretend," I reminded him. "What we do is trade our medicine for the highest quality exports from other lands, so you and I are always in total control of our own kingdom and its resources."

"What's it called?"

"What's what called?"

"Our kingdom."

"Seriously?" I sighed. "Madeupland, we're on the coast just north of King Eric. So this is what I want you to _actually_ think about. One day, Beast shows up and says we can join a super-coalition of all the kingdoms, and we'll all elect one King of All Kingdoms. That King will decide all the laws and policies for the rest of forever, and we'll be second-tier heads of state from then on. All our autonomy gone in a snap. Your fish and game? If Beast decides he wants to export it, it's exported. Our medicine? Auradon's medicine now. If they want to take a bottle of plain water and label it Madeupland Special Elixir, all Beast has to do is pass a law saying it's allowed."

"That's not right!" Armand said firmly, "Medicine isn't something you should fool around with! And that fish and game is mine, not Beast's! We have an annual hunting festival. The five best hunters in the land are chosen to go hunting with me, and there's a big tent and beer and live music, and you hold the Queen's sharpshooting contest. I always win because the reward is a kiss."

"…Okay," I decided to let him run with the details however he needed to. "So why would we ever agree to join Auradon? Even _if_ we trusted Beast, we'd always trust ourselves more. Our people are happy and they love us, and our super medicine puts us in a position to bargain for whatever we need. There's no reason to unite the kingdoms."

"We'd just say no," he decided, very sternly.

"Exactly! So how come when that happened in real life, everyone said yes?"

Armand slumped into the nearest chair, looking concerned and thoughtful. He put a fist to the side of his face and leaned forward, like a less elegant version of a famous statue. His expression twitched faintly, as though he were talking to himself inside his own head.

"It has to do with the Isle of the Lost…" he muttered almost inaudibly.

"I suspect," I said gently, "locking all the villains away on the Isle was the leverage Beast used to get everyone to join Auradon and give him ultimate power."

Armand looked up, eyes wide.

"Like when Mal told everyone if they gave her their lunch tickets, she'd get Harry to stop wrecking up their stuff!"

"I think it's going to be slightly more complicated than that," I said, "but basically, yes."

"And Hans figured it out and he was going to try to blackmail Beast?"

" _Prince_ Hans, and don't be gauche. Blackmail is when you use scandalous private material to hit someone up for cash at regular intervals. It's a very near-sighted approach."

We left the Royal Library and started back towards school. Armand offered to carry the one single book we were bringing back with us, and I let him because odd little things make him happy. We went home through the forest, even though it took longer, because that also made him happy.

Evening was falling. An orange sunset nestled in the west, and the rest of the sky was a powdery blue dotted with stars. The forest was undeniably lovely, full of tall pines, brown-capped mushrooms, spiky green chestnut pods, and acorns that fell from distant oak trees like soft dry rain.

"Does Madeupland have to have thirty thousand kilometers?" He asked, taking my hand and helping me over a fallen log.

"Of course not," I said, not letting go as we walked on. "It can have more."

When we passed by the tourney field, I noticed it was empty but hadn't been for long. Students were loping away from the bleachers in casual groups, taking their time, buzzing with gossip. I later learned Ingrid's protest had derailed tryouts considerably, and it was almost five o'clock before they got started. Unfortunately, it hadn't served to distract Coach Jenkins from Armand's absence, and it'd given Ingrid an exciting new reputation as a violent lunatic.

After parting ways with Armand, I went to my dorm room to find Ingrid lying on her bed, looking furious.

"How long have you been simmering with rage?" I asked her conversationally, kicking off my boots and plunking the book the old man had given me on my makeshift desk.

"I do not want to talk," she said, tones verging on robotic. I disregarded the statement.

"Did you happen to run into Naomi or Junebug?" I grabbed a nightdress and one of my towels from the closet.

"No," she replied tersely, watching without moving.

"That's a shame, it would've cheered you up," I said, very casually. "How would you feel about establishing Auradon's first all-female tourney team? I'm setting it up. I have two more small things to do, but I want you to be captain because I have no idea how to train people, or do physical activities from written instructions. Naomi's been fighting tourney discrimination rather fruitlessly. She's getting together some names of girls who'd been interested in joining."

Ingrid sat up.

"A new team?" She asked. "Under my command? No Coach Jenkins?"

"I'd encourage brutality and loyalty if I were you," I said with a nod. "The boys will be twice as tough as they need to be, just to prove a point, and chances are extremely high you'll have to play Neverland for your first game. And absolutely no Coach Jenkins, he's awful."

"Oh, I can swing brutality and loyalty," she said with a chuckle. "Can I ask why you're involving yourself in this?"

"Because I care deeply about discrimination and you're my best friend. It's the _right thing to do_."

"Fine, don't tell me," she grumbled. "But I want full control on the field, no shadow puppeteering. And if this is some kind of gambling scheme where you expect me to throw games…"

"You too?" I scoffed in disgust. "First blackmail, now gambling schemes. Do I give off the air of having spent a lot of time learning the rackets at Hades' Souvlaki Joint?"

"I was only going to say I want sixty percent of the take." Ingrid grinned, and shook her head in playful disbelief, "You're such a snob."

I laughed and told her I was going in the bath to read and I might be several hours, so if she'd have to go bother Cadfael downstairs if she needed a washroom. She said she was probably going for a run to clear her head, then maybe try and get a copy of the tourney rules and check in with Naomi.

After carefully selecting a bath bomb from the welcome basket (it sat on the back of the toilet tank, rifled through occasionally for spa products), I started to run the water and fetched the book.

Sitting on the edge of the tub, I ran my hand over the cover and examined it more closely. It felt like it had been very much loved.

Books are like people. They give off auras that hint at the stories of their lives. Some books feel like they've been disregarded but remain proud, others have gone soft with the youthful yearning that turned their romantic pages, some stay rigid and forbidding with the knowledge of how many readers they've frightened to the point of nightmares. The book the old man gave me almost felt like a widow, someone who had been happily and blissfully loved for a lifetime and then left alone. Not a craggy bitter widow in mourning blacks, the kind of widow who decides to take up charity work and bake cookies for the neighbourhood children.

The illustrations were beautiful, and at the beginning of each chapter was a large decorated initial, probably once illuminated with the same type of gold flake that had once been on the cover. Several pages appeared to have corners chewed off by goats or sheep.

The whole thing revolved around a prince who disguised himself as a knight and romanced a girl who had no idea he was a prince. She figured it out in the third chapter, which I felt broke the tension a little early. There was a good deal of sword fighting, and several misunderstandings that saw one of the two romantic leads whisked away from the other at key moments – always to a new, vaguely mystical setting. Most of all, there was magic around every corner. Magic creating problems, magic solving problems, magic seeping into every choice and decision everyone made.

I found myself fondest not of the heroes or the villains, but of a dutiful old retainer of the prince. It was implied he had once been the lover of the sorceress who caused everyone's troubles. The retainer was supposed to be something of a joke, I think, but there was a deep pathos around his love. I wondered what sort of person had written the book, was it someone who wanted to be the girl? Was it a wealthy young rake who wanted to play the chivalrous knight? The retainer, old and sure he was nothing but a cheerful entertainment, but still broken-hearted for some long gone true love? Or was it all written by the sorceress?

The sky outside of the small washroom window was almost black. A thin, amber moon looked hazy and strange. The moon on the Isle had somehow seemed closer. I knew it was my imagination, and that obviously it was the same moon, but I remembered the moon of home differently. It was always full, always bright white, always lingering over the ocean, casting a long reflection that made the masts of the pirate ships look like jagged black shadows.

The water in the bath had gone cold, but I was determined to keep my word and finish the book in one go. My father would've chastised me, I'm sure. He always worried I was too nervous about breaking promises, but he didn't realize everyone expected me to break promises because of him. It was much more advantageous to surprise the hell out of people by keeping my word.

In the second to last chapter, the old retainer died saving the girl on behalf of the prince. The sorceress didn't even notice the loss when she reappeared to explain that her machinations had all been to bring the prince and girl together. She'd looked into the future, and they were destined to bring the kingdom peace for a hundred years.

I found myself blithely apologizing to whoever lived in the kingdom when the hundred years was up, because it was probably going to be the most violent tragedy ever conceived, knowing the sorceress as I felt I did by the end.

After I closed the book, I placed it gently on a part of the counter where it wouldn't be splashed while I finished my nightly routine. It seemed satisfied to have been read again, and just as cheerful as when I'd first picked it up. Almost like it, too, was completely oblivious to the old retainer's death.

The lights were out in the bedroom. Ingrid was sprawled over her bed in her usual starfish-like explosion of limbs, and everything was eerily quiet apart from her soft snoring. I was startled at the state of things. Usually, even if the water was running, you could hear someone rummaging around in the other room, or at least the click and clack of the door opening and closing. I must've been more absorbed in the story than I'd realized.

I climbed into bed.

I couldn't sleep.

I just stared at the darkened ceiling thinking about a dead character in a novel.

When it occurred to me that I wasn't just failing to sleep, I was in fact wide awake, I decided to go exploring. I used to do it all the time at home when my mind was working over too many things, just sneak out the attic window and go along the tightly packed rooftops for a little while. See some of the local sights. I grabbed Ingrid's robe off of the peg on the back of the door and slipped out.

On her, it was a flattering length. On me, it nearly dragged on the floor.

The lights in the corridors were dimmed, casting off just enough light to see by in an emergency. The wood panelling on the walls looked more forbidding than usual, and the stone floor was icy cold against my bare feet.

For no reason other than a whim, I decided to head down to the office. Maybe I thought reading people's sealed academic records would cheer me up and get that damnable book out of my head. The office door was closed, and I was expecting it to be locked, but when I turned the handle, it yielded soundlessly and opened. Auradon. They probably don't even have locks on the royal treasury. I imagine there's a tour you can go on.

A few lights in the office had been left on, all dimmed like everywhere else. I strolled the receptionist's desk, noting that there had been quite a few calls from men with titles that afternoon. No doubt Ingrid's display on the field had activated some kind of phone tree of chauvinistic alumni outrage. I noticed two of my uncles were on the list. Prince Rudolph and Prince Ulrich. I've never met them, but from what I can recall of the family legends, Rudolph thinks it's funny to almost drown people and Ulrich can't count past ten. So no big dramatic surprises that they throw their weight around on _vital_ international issues like girls engaging in sport.

I moved towards the offices on the right hand side, the ones tucked away from the sitting area and the seats of shame reserved for those about to be scolded by Fairy Godmother. I traced the nameplates as I passed by the doors. Flora. Fauna. Merriweather. And, of course, at the very end of the short corridor was Queen Belle's on-campus office. I carefully tried the knob. It was locked.

So there _was_ a limit to all this trust.

I went back to the reception area, grabbed a paperclip, and softly picked the lock to Belle's office. I didn't really know why I wanted to go in there, it might've just been something to do for a bit. She might have some interesting papers lying around, although it was very unlikely she kept anything really important at the school.

It was dark inside, so I switched on a desk lamp with a yellow damask shade. The motif was roses. I was getting pretty sick of them.

I was beginning to scan the books she had in the shelves behind her desk, when a voice said sharply:

"Greta? What are you doing?"

I turned to see an exhausted Fairy Godmother, looking very deflated and full of suspicion.

"Oh, I couldn't sleep," I told her truthfully, "I was upset. I just kind of followed the doors that weren't locked and wound up here."

Alright, the last part wasn't truthful.

"It's after midnight," she reminded me, softening.

"I know," I cast my eyes down contritely, "I'm not used to curfews. I'm not used to any of this… and I guess I'm homesick and I don't understand how things are done and I'm trying so hard to get it right but it's still not… I just…"

I collapsed into the chair behind Belle's desk, letting myself look as overwhelmed as possible. Queen Belle was very meticulous about stationary placement, I noticed. There was a pen _perfectly_ parallel to the top of a notepad she'd been writing a list of dates on.

Fairy Godmother sighed maternally, and took the seat across from me.

"It's a big adjustment," she nodded.

"I want to like it here," I lied, "and sometimes I think I do, but then things like today happen. Back on the Isle, anybody who wanted to join a team or play a game could, the only rule was that you had to be good enough to win. But here, the Coach is trying to force Armand to join a team he doesn't want to, and he's not letting Ingrid join even though she does. And first thing on Monday, we have Remedial Goodness which is just going to make things more confusing…"

"How will it make things more confusing?" She asked.

"You're going to spend the whole lesson telling us that the way things are done in Auradon should always be fair, but…" I took a deep sigh, "They don't _feel_ fair at all."

Her whole body slumped a little, and she looked over my shoulder into her own reflection in the window glass. She looked like she might cry.

I had pierced the heart with that one.

Fairy Godmother cleared her throat, readjusted herself and looked at me with an encouraging smile.

"People are always people," she said, as though going back to a time-worn script. "Even though they try, the best of them can make mistakes. Nowhere is perfect, and no one is perfect, and that's what makes the world interesting. But you're right that sometimes it might not be fair. Greta, I know you don't think it means much, but you _are_ a kind of princess. What do you think a good princess would do to make things more fair?"

When she said 'good princess' she meant _morally upstanding young woman_ not _effective career politician_. Of course, if you're properly executing the latter it should always look like the former.

"I don't know," I replied shyly. "I'm not really a princess, so I don't know how to be a good one. Can I have some time to think about it?"

I didn't need time to think, I needed time to find a gullible, inattentive supervising teacher. I had a hunch where I might find one, but it wasn't a guaranteed success. But you can't say that sort of thing out loud.

"Of course," she said, standing up. "Now get back to bed, or I'll turn you into a pumpkin."

She winked playfully and left me alone in the office.

I liked the view from behind the desk, and the chair was extremely comfortable. I stretched my arms over my head and tilted my neck from side to side with a relaxing breath as I watched Fairy Godmother disappear down the hall. I patted the arm rests fondly, and very reluctantly stood up, all the while thinking of something my father had told me before his mysterious disappearance:

"There are all sorts of thrones."

 **A/N: Non-lethal unicorn cookies for dliteful who guessed that the old bookseller had given Greta Belle's old favourite! Great catch!**


End file.
